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Thesis ID: CBB001561511

Pain and the Pursuit of Objectivity: Pain-Measuring Technologies in the United States, c. 1890--1975 (2006)

McGill University
Publication date: 2006
Language: English

Publication Date: 2006
Physical Details: 344 pp.

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Medicine Measurement Medical instruments and apparatus Pain Medical technology Objectivity 20th century 19th century United States

Since the late 19 th century, scientists and clinicians have generated an astonishing array of meters, scales, experimental designs, and questionnaires to quantify pain with more precision, accuracy, and objectivity. In this thesis, I follow the development and implementation of pain-measuring technologies in the United States until the mid-1970s. Focussing on how these technologies work, I analyse the relationship between practices of objectification; the social, material and technical resources on which these practices depend; and changing conceptions of pain, subjectivity and objectivity. Surprisingly, as efforts to objectify pain were intensified, pain was increasingly conceptualised as a subjective experience, that is, as a phenomenon inextricably tied to the unique emotional, psychological, and social condition of the experiencing self. I argue that this transformation was not solely due to the development of new theoretical models of pain, but also, importantly, enabled by the implementation of new technologies that could measure pain as an individual and psychological phenomenon. I also argue that the successful implementation of these technologies depended on the availability of specific social, material, and technical resources, and examine the social settings in which these resources were made available. The main motivation for the direct investment of new resources towards pain- measuring technologies was a desire to make analgesic drug testing more objective. Beginning in the late 1930s, professional, industrial and public health interests in drug addiction, opiate pharmacology, new drug development and therapeutic testing converged on the goal of better pain-measurement. By the 1950s, the organisation and funding of analgesic testing made it possible to implement and validate the analgesic clinical trial, a technology that determined analgesic efficacy by measuring collective pain and its relief. The validity of the clinical was based on procedural and statistical control of data collection and analysis, rather than on the standardisation of individual experiences and evaluations of pain. It became possible to think of pain relief as an inevitably idiosyncratic experience, open to multiple sources of psychological variation, and yet still measure it consistently and objectively on a collective level. Keywords. pain; measurement; objectivity; subjectivity, clinical trials; analgesics: psychophysics; psychosomatics; history of medicine; history of science.

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Description Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 68/05 (2007). Pub. no. AAT NR27851.

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