The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers

Everyone knows what it feels like to be in pain. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. But how do we communicate pain to others? Many people in pain start by saying 'it cannot be expressed in words'... and then go on to give very 'wordy' accounts of their feelings. Most of us assume that pain-is-pain-is-pain. But it is not. How people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has changed over time. In the eighteenth andnineteenth centuries, for example, people believed that pain served a specific (and positive) function - it was a message from God or Nature; it would perfect the spirit. 'Suffer in this life and youwouldn't suffer in the next one'. Submission to pain was required. Nothing could be more removed from twentieth and twenty-first century understandings, where pain is regarded as an unremitting evil to be 'fought'. This book looks at people who are in pain: how have they interpreted their suffering? What do they do? How do friends and family react? What about medical professional: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professionaldetachment? As Joanna Bourke shows, a history of pain tells us a great deal about the many ways we can respond to our own pains - and to those of others.