Introduction

Increasingly, critics accused practitioners of hiding hubris behind their purported humanity and questioned whether an increasingly professional scientific community could retain its grip on the meaning of compassion. This volume presents a set of responses to this criticism and others, showing the extent to which the lived-experience of scientific practice became a justification in and of itself for the expression of social, political and cultural authority. Bare knowledge, as it was presented, came with an enormous social valuation. These sources show how that authority changed and grew over time.