Content area
Full text
Joanna Bourke. The Story of Pain: From Prayers to Painkillers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. xii + 396pp. Clothbound, $34.95.
Ronald Schleifer. Pain and Suffering. New York: Routledge, 2014. xii + 169pp. Paperback, $34.95.
Pain is an overwhelming experience. It imprisons the one experiencing it in a pitiless and all-encompassing present that can only be fully grasped by the one in pain. From Alphonse Daudet's evocative nineteenth-century notes on pain to Elaine Scarry's canonical The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, writers have repeatedly emphasized pain's essentially private and privatizing components. This insight, Joanna Bourke's and Ronald Schleifer 's new studies suggest, only tells part of the story. Both studies argue that pain is a sharable event, one that mediates between the private and public. However much the pain-event differs for the one being in it and the one witnessing it (and both authors point out that studies using fMRI technologies suggests that these experiences are actually not that far apart), pain is, as Daudet remarks in passing, experienced and communicated to an "entourage."1 Pain is-however insufficiently-shared, and this process of transmission always draws on the particular environment in which it is experienced.
"Pain events are inherently social and, therefore, integral to the creation of communities" (46). Bourke makes this surprising claim in her ambitious study. And in her exploration of the many narratives emerging out of these communities-homes, hospitals, and workhouses-she carefully takes apart the many layers of cultural construction that partake in the expression of pain, which has been significantly less explored than its alleviation. The sheer diversity and breadth of the exceptionally rich material she examines within the Anglo-American context, from the eighteenth century to the present, and the intellectual vigor of the Foucauldian analysis she constructs in the nine interconnected chapters will certainly make The Story of Pain a useful reference work for researchers working on pain from various disciplines. Additionally, this remarkably well-written book presents historical scholarship in an accessible manner, without sacrificing its academic rigor or compromising its meticulously detailed readings.
In Bourke's revisiting of a number of well-established claims about pain, she sets out to turn many of them upside down. At the beginning of this immersion into the community-producing nature of pain stands...