Story of 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