From Prayers to Painkillers

 In 1977, the International Association for the Study of Pain leadenly defined pain as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage”. But pain for the academic historian Joanna Bourke is a “definition-defying beast”. It can be headache or heartache. A punishment for a life of bad habits. A gift from God to be endured in imitation of the Calvary. An invasion by a germ. Even a communicable disease of its own – at the Glasgow Cancer Hospital in the 1890s, it was widely believed that “cancer-pain might be contagious”.

In The Story of Pain, Bourke analyses the language that pain-sufferers in Britain and America from the 1760s grabbed hold of in their attempt to communicate with others. Listening to what these people said not only tells us “a great deal about their experiences”, but also might enable us “to forge more just and creative worlds”.