The Culture of Pain - by David B Morris (Paperback)

About the Book

Up-to-date medical knowledge is combined with the definition of pain in Western literature and culture. "The experience of pain as shaped by individual minds and specific cultures, from tortured victims of the Inquisition to the Nazi death camps, the phantom limb pain of amputees and the suffering of victims of arthritis, disability, cancer and AIDS".--Publishers Weekly. Illustrated.

Book Synopsis

This is a book about the meanings we make out of pain. The greatest surprise I encountered in discussing this topic over the past ten years was the consistency with which I was asked a single unvarying question: Are you writing about physical pain or mental pain? The overwhelming consistency of this response convinces me that modern culture rests upon and underlying belief so strong that it grips us with the force of a founding myth. Call it the Myth of Two Pains. We live in an era when many people believe--as a basic, unexamined foundation of thought--that pain comes divided into separate types: physical and mental. These two types of pain, so the myth goes, are as different as land and sea. You feel physical pain if your arm breaks, and you feel mental pain if your heart breaks. Between these two different events we seem to imagine a gulf so wide and deep that it might as well be filled by a sea that is impossible to navigate.

From the Back Cover

"This illuminating work boldly ranges beyond conventional boundaries to provide a deeper understanding of our common afflictions, our humanity, and our ennobling struggle for transcendence."--1992 PEN/Spielvogel-Diamonstein Award, Judges Martha Nussbaum, Joyce Carol Oates, Ronald Steel "Eloquent and fascinating . . . Morris does not dispel the mystery of pain. Instead he explores its full scope. HIs message for doctors is that they should stop denying the mystery, stop insisting that pain is a mere biological puzzle. . . . His message for patients in pain is that the mind has many roles to play."--Melvin Konner, New York Times Book Review "Not only a rich tapestry of understanding, but also an elegantly written work, which is, perhaps paradoxically, a pleasure to read. . . . Any physician who treats people in pain ought to read this book, and I doubt that any will be able to approach pain in the same way afterward."--Howard Brody, M.D., Journal of the American Medical Association

About the Author

David B. Morris resigned in 1982 from the University of Iowa, where he was professor of English, to move to Michigan and devote himself to writing. An earlier book, Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense (1984), won the Gottshalk Price of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies.