The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers - Hardcover

Bourke, Joanna

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0199689423 ISBN 13: 9780199689422

Publisher: OUP Oxford, 2014

Synopsis

Everyone knows what is 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.

About this title

Review:

Historians and general readers alike will find much of interest in this entertaining and thoughtful book, with its meticulously researched wealth of patient accounts throughout history. (History Today, Stephanie Eichberg)

Joanna Bourke, in The Story of Pain, provides a highly original and thought-provoking study ofthe modern experiences of pain with the potential to open up innumerable areas of inquiry in medical humanities research. (British Journal for the History of Science, Ian Miller)

Joanna Bourke's premise is that pain has a history: it is not simply a physiological event but also a cultural affair, making "pain" inherently social. We really do feel differently, react differently, in relation to pain, depending upon the metaphors and language we have for understanding it. (Lynne Segal, Book of the Year 2014, Times Higher Education)

In The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers historian Joanna Bourke charts the ways in which pain was felt in the past and shows that sensation itself is inextricably bound up with mind, culture and soul. She scours medical and psychological sources, images, gestures and written testimony to build up a picture of suffering and its interpretations since the 18th century. Like Gawande, her underlying question is: can we learn to "suffer better"? (Lisa Appignanesi, Book of the Year 2014, Guardian)

This is a serious, absorbing book (John Hinton, Catholic Herald)

Joanna Bourkes brilliant study of pain shows us exactly why pain is both so very personal to each of us and so elusive to scientific description, even in the 21st century. (Sander Gilman, Irish Times)

The breadth of The Story of Pain is one of its principal strengths, as the book's fascinating and illuminating examples shift masterfully and continually across the Western world and between the 18th century and the present day ... Bourke has provided a remarkable book, which is both highly valuable in its own right and which also provides the groundwork and impetus for further study. The Story of Pain is a detailed, thought-provoking and fascinating piece of historical scholarship. (Dr. Jennifer Crane, Reviews in History)

Bourke's book is a magnificent feat of research ... As an insight into the roots of medical perspectives on pain, and why we're often so bad at tackling it, Bourke's history will help. (Gavin Francis, London Review of Books)

Bourke has interesting things to say about the language of pain ... [She] has read widely, and produced some interesting reflections on what it means to be in pain, how pain is socially structured and dealth with, as well as the limits of our contemporary embrace of chemical means of coping with pain. (Andrew Scull, The Times Literary Supplement)

The Story of Pain is a fascinating rousing story of mad and wanton cruelty: throughout human history, such shafts of compassion only occasionally and reluctantly break through. (Roger Lewis, Daily Mail)

About the Author:

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck College, University of London. She is the prize-winning author of nine books, including histories of modern warfare, military medicine, psychology and psychiatry, the emotions, and rape. Among others, she is the author of Dismembering the Male: Men's Bodies, Britain, and the Great War (1996), An Intimate History of Killing (1999), Fear: A Cultural History (2005) and Rape: A History from 1860 to the Present (2007), and What it Means to be Human: Reflections from 1791 to the Present (2011). An Intimate History of Killing won the Wolfson Prize and the Fraenkel Prize, and 'Eyewitness', her audio history of Britain, won a number of prizes, including the Gold for the Most Original Audio. She is also a frequent contributor to TV and radio shows, and a regular newspaper correspondent.

About this edition

• Publisher: OUP Oxford
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0199689423
• ISBN 13: 9780199689422
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 416