Cicely Saunders and Total Pain - (Contemporary Cultural Studies in Illness, Health and Medicine) by Joe Wood

About the Book

Offers the first full-length study of Cicely Saunders' idea of 'total pain', providing a fresh perspective on the ambiguous place of narrative in healthcare

Book Synopsis

Introduced in 1964, Cicely Saunders' term 'total pain' has come to epitomise the holistic ethos of hospice and palliative care. It communicates how a dying person's pain can be a whole overwhelming experience, not only physical but also psychological, social and spiritual. 'Total pain' clearly summarises Saunders' whole-person, multidisciplinary outlook but is it a phenomenon, an intervention framework, a care approach - or something else? This book disregards the idea that Saunders' phrase has one coherent meaning and instead explores the multiple interpretations now current in contemporary professional discourse. Using close reading of Saunders' extensive publications, as well as archival evidence and Saunders' own personal library, it situates the current usage of 'total pain' in wider histories of clinical holism, questions its similarity to later ideas of narrative medicine, and explores how it might express the ambiguities of bearing witness to pain and vulnerability when someone is dying.

Review Quotes

As end-of-life care attracts increasing scrutiny, this carefully researched monograph, incorporating innovative scholarship in the medical/health humanities, offers an extensive, engaging and necessary re-appraisal of the concept of 'total pain'.--Steven Wilson, Queen's University Belfast

Pain, dying, loss - bleak topics for most of us. And yet, with sharp and delicate attentiveness, Wood shows how we might adventure with 'total pain', as Cicely Saunders did, as a pathway back to our inescapable vulnerability and interdependence. The value of bearing witness to suffering, the extending of personhood beyond the individual, the recognition of pain in its many forms, outreach the deathbed. These are lessons that speak to the weight of genocidal and environmental catastrophes as much as to loving accompaniment as the most radical form of care.--Yasmin Gunaratnam, King's College London