Ronald Schleifer - Pain and Suffering

Pain and Suffering

Pain is felt by everyone, yet understanding its nature is fragmented across myriad modes of thought. In this compact, yet thoroughly integrative account uniting medical science, psychology, and the humanities Ronald Schleifer offers a deep and complex understanding, along with possible strategies of dealing with pain in its most overwhelming forms. A perfect addition to many courses in medicine, healthcare, counseling psychology, and social work.

Ronald Schleifer is George Lynn Cross Research Professor in the Department of English at the University of Oklahoma, where he is also Adjunct Professor in Medicine. His most recent books include Intangible Materialism: The Body, Scientific Knowledge, and the Power of Language (2009), Modernism and Popular Music (2011), and The Chief Concern of Medicine: The Integration of the Medical Humanities and Narrative Knowledge into Medical Practices, co-authored with Dr. Jerry Vannatta (2013). He has served as editor of the scholarly journals Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture and Configurations: A Journal of Literature, Science, and Technology.

The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture

Editor: Lennard J. Davis, University of Illinois at Chicago

The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture aims to reunite the major discourses of science and the humanities that parted ways about 150 years ago. Each book picks an important topic that can best be understood by a synthesis of the best science and the best social and cultural analysis. In an age when more and more major political and life decisions involve complex understandings of science, medicine, and technology, we need to have a bioculturally sophisticate citizenry who can weigh in on these important issues. To that end these books aim to reach a wide swathe of people, presenting the information in readable, illustrated, succinct editions that are designed for classroom and scholarly use as well as for public consumption.

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Pain and Suffering

Ronald Schleifer

First published 2014
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

2014 Taylor & Francis

The right of Ronald Schleifer to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Schleifer, Ronald.
Pain and suffering / by Ronald Schleifer.
pages cm. (The Routledge series integrating science and culture)
Summary: Pain is felt by everyone, yet understanding its nature is fragmented across myriad modes of thought. In this compact, yet thoroughly integrative account uniting medical science, psychology, and the humanities Ronald Schleifer offers a deep and complex understanding along with possible strategies of dealing with pain in its most overwhelming forms. A perfect addition to many courses in medicine, healthcare, counseling psychology, and social work Provided by publisher.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Pain. 2. Suffering. I. Title.
RB127.S347 2014
616.0472dc23
2013030565

ISBN: 9780-415843263 (hbk)
ISBN: 9780-415843270 (pbk)
ISBN: 9780-203757345 (ebk)

The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture aims to restore connections between the sciences and the humanities, connections that were severed over 150 years ago. This mutual exclusion was done in the name of expertise values and morality in the world of humanism. In some sense, each side was seen as the societal enemy of the other. From the humanists perspective, scientists threatened to make the world a colder, more efficient place lacking in feelings and values. From the scientists viewpoint, humanists were interfering with progress by injecting bleeding hearts and unreasonable fears into an essentially rational process.

But the reality is that now, in the twenty-first century, it is getting harder and harder for humanists to comment on civic and social matters without knowing something about science, medicine, and technology. Suddenly there is a need to understand stem cells, brain scans, DNA technologies, organ transplants, ecological outcomes, and the like in order to be a knowledgeable citizen, legislator, or scholar. Likewise, scientists routinely include the ethical, social, cultural, and legal in their research protocols and scientific articles. The divide between the two cultures described by C. P. Snow in the 1950s is less and less possible in the twenty-first century. On the ground, humanists and scientists are again in need of each other.

To that end, the books in this series will focus on the cultural side of science and the scientific side of culture. David Morris and I have coined the term biocultural to indicate this new realm of study and critique. Ronald Schleifers Pain and Suffering is a perfect addition to The Routledge Series Integrating Science and Culture. Pain and suffering seem to be terms and conditions that have an immediate and understandable connection with medicine. Indeed when we have extended physical pain we take that as a sign that we need to see a doctor. When we have extended emotional pain we seek the services of a therapist or psychiatrist. Suffering, on the other hand, while having a medical component is broad enough to extend to the existential, political, and philosophical realms. So we might think that purely physical pain is something we dont need to understand in a cultural sense. But what Schleifer does so well is to help us understand that pain along with suffering is a cultural phenomenon as much as it is a physical one. Drawing such a link is important for the general biocultural project because something like pain seems at the outset to be something quite as far from culture and interpretation as anything could be. Pain seems like a bare, brutal fact, as sure as death and taxes. If something with the solidity and thereness of pain could be open to a biocultural interpretation and understanding, then there really isnt anything that couldnt be. In this sense, we could say that pain is the limit case for arguing that a biocultural explanation of phenomena is not only valid but also necessary. It is the accomplishment of Ronald Schleifers book to have easily and seamlessly made and proven that argument.

Lennard J. Davis

Series Editor

The purpose of this book is to offer to students, healthcare workers, the general public, and those who labor with pain in their lives a working sense of the latest understanding of the nature and phenomenon of human pain to the end of comprehension and action in relation to that pain. As I note throughout this book, pain is a ubiquitous part of human experiencemany assert that it is one of the defining features of human life altogetherand a clearer understanding of how it works and what it means has the potential to make the lives of those in pain and of those who share their lives with people in pain less narrow, more fulfilling, and simply more bearable. That is my great hope for this book. To this end, I have examined closely the work of healthcare workers engaged with patients in pain, scientists, social scientists, philosophers, artists who study and represent the phenomena of human pain, and the moving and sometimes harrowing narratives of those who suffer the long-term affliction and distress of pain. I end the book with a chapter that attempts to explicitly articulate strategies of care for pain that can be taken up by healthcare workers, companions, and those who suffer pain themselves.