Contact Medicine On Screen

Shared Suffering Onscreen: Animal Experiments and Emotional Investment in the Films of O.H. Mowrer

The history of animal testing and the history of the life sciences go hand in hand. Yet as Ben Schultz-Figueroa argues in this essay, these experiments were always fraught, as scientists had to manage their own emotional entanglement with their animal subjects, who often were killed or maimed in the process of the experiment. This is the “shared suffering” of the lab, and Schultz-Figueroa’s work prompts us to think about it not only as a guidepost for understanding the ethics of animal experiments but also as a methodological tool to understand visual images, specifically films, from the history of science. Mowrer’s films contain traces of the burdened relationship between him and his rodent test subjects.

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