Some painful perspectives on pain

Abstract

We generally assume that pain is something bad, something to be avoided or prevented, and something to be alleviated or abolished. Javier Moscoso reveals how selective, if not blinkered, we are. In doing so he writes about topics that may be unfamiliar and unsettling to many doctors, neurologists among them, and even more so to patients suffering from pain. But that is not to say these topics should not be discussed; not only do they form the background from which the theories and practice of modern pain medicine emerged, but many aspects continue to have relevance today. Pain: A Cultural History deals neither with the history of pain relating to Greek, Indian and Chinese cultures covered, for instance, in Keele’s Anatomies of Pain (1957); nor the more conventional historical approach adopted in Rey’s History of Pain (1993). Rather, the book comprises a loosely historical narrative tracing the story over the past 500 years and is divided into chapters rather esoterically entitled Representations, Imitation, Sympathy, Correspondence, Trust, Narrativity, Coherence and Reiteration – titles chosen because these ‘concepts … are some of the forms that enable the configuration of pain into an intersubjective reality that can be analyzed’ (p. 7). The chapters’ titles and Moscoso’s explanation of them give the clue to the perspective he adopts, which particularly in the early chapters is very much from the philosophical angle. Inevitably Kant and Schopenhauer, Foucault and Wittgenstein, Durkheim and Adorno all feature, and the opening lines of the Introduction warn us of the author’s approach and style: ‘Pain, which almost always lacks justification, does have a history. If we took the teachings of Lucretius seriously, we would have to concede that the historians who have washed their hands of the passions could only write the history of concealment and lies, given that, …