ABSTRACT
With the use of Valerie Curtis’s parasite avoidance theory as the hypothesis behind the emergence of disgust within the panoply of human emotions, this chapter investigates selected scientific works by Charles Darwin, Friedrich Küchenmeister, T. Spencer Cobbold, and Rudolf Leuckart, with particular attention paid to the issues of presence and applicability of disgust in their studies. These are compared and contrasted with selected literary works of the same period—by Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells—in which scientists and medical figures express disgust at the objects of their study, that is, various incarnations of literary parasites. The aim of the chapter is to argue that the scientific and literary objectives of employing disgust as one of the categories of evaluation, instead of presenting parallel messages, are at least partially at odds: in the case of the former, disgust is used merely in a corrective manner, or as an expression of intellectual advancement, while in the latter as a tool of colonial oppression.
