Pain: Historical Reflections on Suffering

What is pain? This is a more difficult question to answer than you might think. In 1939, the famous surgeon René Leriche observed that pain is “like a storm…. the patient is beside himself, quite beyond all capability of analyzing it”. Taming this storm was a task fraught with anxiety for physicians as well as patients. History can tell us a lot about the way people have attempted to understand pain and make it amenable to being communicated to others. By knowing how people in the past have coped with painful ailments, perhaps we can learn to “suffer better”.

Speaker Details

Joanna Bourke is Professor of History at Birkbeck, University of London, and a Fellow of the British Academy.She is the prize-winning author of thirteen books. In 2014, she was the author of The Story of Pain: From Prayer to Painkillers (OUP) and Wounding the World: How Military Violence and War-Play are Invading our Lives(Virago). An Intimate History of Killing won the Wolfson Prize and the Fraenkel Prize. Her books have been translated into Chinese, Russian, Spanish, Catalan, Italian, Portuguese, Czech, Turkish, and Greek.  She is the Principal Investigator on a five-year Wellcome Trust-funded project entitled “Sexual Violence, Medicine, and Psychiatry”.