There is an obvious reason for that — disgust is disgusting — and a more subtle one: To dwell too much on disgust is to risk losing any sense of the object of study. (In this, ‘disgustology’ resembles ‘sexology.’) …
In the last few years, however, the study of disgust has emerged from the province of specialists and their textbooks to take its place in the public square. This emergence can be precisely dated to 1997, with the appearance of The Anatomy of Disgust, by William Ian Miller, an iconoclastic professor of law at the University of Michigan whose previous book had been devoted to humiliation, and ethicist Leon Kass’s widely debated New Republic cover essay ‘The Wisdom of Repugnance,’ which made an argument against human cloning.” — Boston Globe
