Book ID: CBB001202302

The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (2014)

unapi

Bourke, Joanna (Author)


Oxford University Press


Publication Date: 2014
Physical Details: x + 396 pp.; ill.; bibl.; index
Language: English

Everyone knows what it feels like to be in pain. Scraped knees, toothaches, migraines, giving birth, cancer, heart attacks, and heartaches: pain permeates our entire lives. We also witness other people - loved ones - suffering, and we 'feel with' them. It is easy to assume this is the end of the story: 'pain-is-pain-is-pain', and that is all there is to say. But it is not. In fact, the way in which people respond to what they describe as 'painful' has changed considerably over time. In the eighteenth and nineteenth 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 you wouldn'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'. Focusing on the English-speaking world, this book tells the story of pain since the eighteenth century, addressing fundamental questions about the experience and nature of suffering over the last three centuries. How have those in pain interpreted their suffering - and how have these interpretations changed over time? How have people learnt to conduct themselves when suffering? How do friends and family react? And what about medical professionals: should they immerse themselves in the suffering person or is the best response a kind of professional detachment? As Joanna Bourke shows in this fascinating investigation, people have come up with many different answers to these questions over time. And a history of pain can tell us a great deal about how we might respond to our own suffering in the present - and, just as importantly, to the suffering of those around us.

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Reviewed By

Review Rob Boddice (2015) Review of "The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers". Social History of Medicine (pp. 392-393). unapi

Review Flurin Condrau (2016) Review of "The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers". Isis: International Review Devoted to the History of Science and Its Cultural Influences (pp. 377-379). unapi

Review Moscoso, Javier (2015) Review of "The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers". Medical History (pp. 327-328). unapi

Review Miller, Ian (2015) Review of "The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers". British Journal for the History of Science (pp. 191-193). unapi

Citation URI
https://data.isiscb.org/isis/citation/CBB001202302/

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Authors & Contributors
Upshur, Ross
Dickson, Sheila
David Clark
Marco Castellari
Duffee, Charlotte Mary
Lin, Yii-Jan Chen
Concepts
Pain
Therapeutic practice; therapy; treatment
Public understanding of medicine
Science and culture
Medicine
Medicine and society
Time Periods
19th century
20th century
18th century
21st century
17th century
Early modern
Places
United States
Europe
England
Germany
Great Britain
Italy
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