With her essay, Murphy hopes to draw a close connection between literature and scientific debate. She brings Heart and Science up as a point of reference when talking about how literature can help readers understand one side of an argument. In her conclusion, Murphy says Heart and Science, “[seeks] to negotiate a way between the polarities of ‘heart’ and ‘science’ as they were rhetorically constructed in the heat of the vivisection debates” (Murphy 383). This quote uses a text to argue that literature can be representative of a historical era. In other words, authors can structure their writing in order to forward a conversation happening in real time. Heart and Science comes from a time of constant vivisection debate and ultimately attempts to sway the audience a certain way. It takes information from other conversations and ultimately adds to it in order to get the authors point of view out to readers. If I were to work on forwarding this article by Murphy, I’d probably be interested in staring by borrowing the ideas she illustrates. This seems to be the type of forwarding that would be appropriate from my current standpoint in this discussion. Then I would look into finding other literature that may back up the points; especially sources that aren’t what Murphy has already exhausted.
