Like dementia, persistent pain comes with irreparable losses: physical restrictions, strained relationships, financial problems, perished dreams and ambitions. Both conditions require ethnographers and care professionals to shift focus from cure to care, from treating illnesses to learning how to live with restrictions. The question thus emerges: how do we learn to live with such ‘diseases that do not go away’ …
Tag Archives: Pain
Dreaming Borders: On Cats and Trauma
I dream of a black cat. She jumps over a barbed wire fence, and across it. She leaps from one side of the fence to the other. Her coat glistens in the moonlight. Except for the gentle sound of her purring, the village where I stand is silent.
The silence was unnerving. Even remote villages were rarely silent along the …
Thinking pain
Care worker Annika announces that she does not want to go to Mr Moran. “He always complains.” “I’ll go”, says her colleague Robin, and turning to me he says, “I don’t have the intern today so you can come along if you want to see for yourself how it goes”. We head off to assemble the materials for the morning …
Mara Buchbinder’s “All In Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain”
All In Your Head: Making Sense of Pediatric Pain
University of California Press, 2015, 256 pages
Pain has a famously intangible quality. To paraphrase Elaine Scarry, for the person in pain, “having pain” can be wholly consuming and experienced as concrete reality. But for all its “there-ness,” pain is difficult to pin down, measure and describe. …
Cassandra Crawford’s Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology
Phantom Limb: Amputation, Embodiment, and Prosthetic Technology
NYU Press, 2014, 314 pages
The title of this important book gives only the slightest hint of the extraordinarily complex account that Crawford has produced about the biopolitics of limb absence and other forms of acquired limb loss, the meaning of phantom sensation and phantom pain, and the work …
Anesthesia
Every sensation is a question, even if the only answer is silence. [i]
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
When Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. delivered his introductory lecture on anatomy and physiology to students at the Massachusetts Medical College in the fall of 1847, he noted that for the patient, thanks to ether, “the fierce extremity of suffering has …