Edison and the Electric Chair_ A Story of Light and Death - Mark Essig [37]
The intellectual origins of this revolution in human feeling lay in the late seventeenth century, when Anglican clerics, rejecting both the angry God of the Puritans and Thomas Hobbes's dark view of human nature, redefined God as benevolent and human nature as intrinsically compassionate. Inspired by these attitudes, a generation of writers—the philosopher Francis Hutcheson, novelists Sarah Fielding and Samuel Richardson—gave birth to a "humanitarian sensibility" and spread the gospel that cruelty was repugnant and sympathy the highest human emotion. The word civilization arose alongside the humanitarian sensibility and was tightly bound with it. Those who inflicted pain were "barbarous"; those who did not were "civilized." People widened their circle of sympathy to embrace not only family members and fellow villagers but a broad swath of humanity. Practices that had been unquestioned for centuries—child labor, slavery, torture, bull-baiting—came to be criticized as heartlessly cruel. The U.S. Constitution's prohibition of "cruel and unusual punishments" was an expression of this compassionate sensibility, as was the decision by many states to limit the number of crimes punishable by death.3
This way of thinking was restricted to the upper classes of England and America in the years before the American Revolution. In the nineteenth century the middle classes embraced humanitarianism as a sign of respectability and applied it to a wide range of social reforms. Some of the first targets were the miserable conditions in the slums of industrializing cities. Massachusetts, the first American state to industrialize, enacted its first laws regulating child labor in 1842. Other humanitarian reforms included the education of the blind and deaf, treatment of the mentally ill, public health measures, and better housing for the poor. The most famous and most significant movement was abolition, undertaken in part out of sympathy with slaves. These were complex movements driven by many motivations, but the desire to decrease the measure of human suffering was prominent among them.4
Nothing better illustrates the revulsion at pain than the discovery and lightning-quick adoption of medical anesthesia. Surgery before anesthesia was an exercise in torture. Doctors, like orthodox Christians, traditionally viewed pain as inevitable, or even as a necessary part of the healing process. But as fear of suffering grew, fewer doctors found this attitude viable. In 1846, a Boston dentist demonstrated that ether gas could prevent the pain of surgery. Within a few years doctors discovered that chloroform and nitrous oxide produced similar effects. Some doctors resisted because of the health risks of anesthesia, or because they continued to believe that suffering was good for the patient. Most, though, were thrilled to have a way to ease their patients' suffering. No medical discovery had ever gained general acceptance so quickly. Anesthesia both reflected and reinforced the culture's aversion to pam—now that it could be relieved, it became even more repugnant.5
Not only humans benefited from the humanitarian sensibility. In 1866 Henry Bergh, the wayward and wealthy heir to a shipbuilding fortune, founded the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. The names of the men who assisted Bergh with the project—John Jacob Astor Jr., Horace Greeley, Peter Cooper, Ezra Cornell-indicated the social constituency of the cause. Bergh's organization was modeled after the Royal SPCA in London, but the American humane movement soon outstripped its British counterpart. SPCAs were established in Philadelphia, Boston, Buffalo, and other cities. The societies had the power to bring legal action against animal abusers, but their primary mission was not prosecutory but pedagogic: teaching people, especially children, that it was wrong to make animals suffer.6
The SPCA drew its membership almost entirely from the upper and middle classes, and there was good reason for this. The poor—trapped in the lethal squalor of industrial America,