Body, Mind and Madness: Pain in Animals in Nineteenth-Century Comparative Psychology

Abstract

Pain is a temporal entity that belongs neither in the history of the passions nor in the history of science, but rather ‘between the world of emotions and the realm of sensations’, in the history of experience.¹ The experiential nature of pain presents a challenge of subjectivity to both contemporary and historical study: how can we truly understand another’s experience of pain? When questions of animal pain are addressed, the historian faces greater problems still. The complexity of interspecies subjectivity is compounded by anxieties of anthropomorphic validity. If we cannot fully understand the pain of another human being, who expresses emotional and/or sensational feelings through familiar words or contortions of the face and/or body, then how can it be possible to know what an animal is feeling? It is a state where neither the quality nor the quantity of the feeling can be understood. To begin to address this complexity, this chapter focuses on Scottish naturalist-physician William Lauder Lindsay’s contribution to the theories of comparative psychology, setting out to locate his approach between the emotional and sensational worlds identified by Moscoso. It argues that animals’ capacity subjectively to experience emotional or mental pain came to be accepted in part because of a prior acknowledgment that they suffered physical pain. The roots of comparative psychology are to be found, in part, within the history of physiology and its understanding of sensational pain.