Pain: The Forgotten Emotion

[Transcript of a paper given at the University of Melbourne, Australia, November 18, 2015]

Today I want simply to give you a brief insight into the work I’ve been doing over the past few years on the subject of pain, its history and its present, with a few suggestions for the potential practical relevance of the history of emotions for contemporary medical practice. This work began life in 2011 within the framework of the history of emotions, as part of a postdoc at the Languages of Emotion Excellence Cluster at Freie Universitaet Berlin, in conjunction with what has turned out to be a long stay at the Centre for the History of Emotions at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. I was, ostensibly, working on the history of sympathy and compassion at the beginning of that project, having previously carried out research on the history of cruelty and pain in animals. But I was obliged to make some connections that weren’t immediately obvious to me when Joanna Bourke invited me to be a Pain Fellow at the Birkbeck Pain Project in London in 2012. The focus there was supposed to be bodily pain, but I quickly realised that a mind/body dualistic approach wasn’t going to work, and that the work I’d been doing on sympathy was in fact a close and informative bedfellow of pain.

What has followed has been a bit of an adventure, which has taken me out of my modern-historian comfort zone in a number of different directions. I’ve engaged many different disciplinary approaches to pain, gone back through the ages to examine the wealth of historical literature on pain, and scrutinised many more recent historical and contemporary medical journals than I’d ever thought likely. I’ve talked with anaesthetists, plastic surgeons, bioethicists, art practitioners, lawyers and anthropologists in a bid to try and join up the thinking on pain.

The first result of all this was an edited volume that came out last year, called Pain and Emotion in Modern History, which makes one titular compromise that I would now like to undo. I’d like to swap out the ‘and’ and replace it with ‘as’. As it stands the book attempts to collapse the distinction between physical and emotional and to reassess some well worn historiographical paths by taking seriously historical claims that feelings hurt. I think I’m right in saying that for modern historians at least, this was novel and unexpected, and came with a heavy burden of proof. But I was aware that for early modernists and medievalists these claims were perhaps already in the mainstream, and indeed for some within contemporary neuroscientific research the emotional nature of pain was driving experimentation. What I couldn’t see – at all – was any sense that any of these distinct fields were aware of each other, let alone talking to one another. I saw huge potential in reassessing the historical narrative in the light of some of the latest neuroscientific research, and indeed reassessing some of that neuro-research in the light of the historiography.

That led me to take on another project, which I’m finishing up in Melbourne, to write Pain: A Very Short Introduction, which rather terrifyingly is to cover the history of pain from antiquity to the present, and to include an analysis of contemporary medical and scientific understandings of pain, all in 35,000 words. What you’re getting today is sort of a precis of the argument in that book, and I hope to at least convey my main points: first, that pain is an emotion or, if that is too stark, that pain is meaningless without emotion; second, that if emotional experience is historical, contextually contingent, mutable, then so must be the experience of pain; third, if this is true, then pain necessarily resists a definition, and treatment and management must be carried out with an attention to any sufferer’s subjective appraisal of their own pain and the cultural context in which pain is expressed.

Why do I call pain a ‘forgotten’ emotion? Well, as I combed the historical record I found that, with remarkable consistency across time and place, people seemed instinctively to know that bodily pain and emotional pain were of the same order, and while historians have carefully pointed out this fact they have done so through the lens of modernity, which has been characterised by a dualistic approach that has mechanised pain in the body and made pain of the mind a distinct kind of disorder. The effect: historical actors’ own conceptualisations of pain have been treated as novel and re-constructible on the one hand, but exotic, unfamiliar and wrong, strictly speaking. At the same time, the neuroscientific research that is convincingly demonstrating how pain is contextually and emotionally experienced has no connection whatsoever to this long view. Ostensibly, neuroscientists are confirming what the colloquial expressions of ordinary people suggest was already known – in fact continues to be known in everyday experience – but which had been forgotten in scientific and academic bowers since the time of Descartes. Meanwhile, current medical approaches to pain in clinical settings are largely disconnected from both these strands of research, still underemphasise the substantive interrelationship of body, brain and society in the construction of meaningful experiences of pain, and therefore still tend to treat people in pain according to presentations of bodily lesion or mental disturbance. If medicine could be inspired to remember that pain is an emotion or made meaningful only through emotion, then pain management would radically change.

I begin the book with a conceptual analysis of pain in history, examining how the language of pain has tended to conflate body and soul, body and mind, and physical and emotional. These are common expressions of pain that betray a fundamental fuzziness of the category of pain. The ancient Greeks had a number of words for pain and suffering that tended to overlap. Chief among these terms was άλγος (algos), which denoted physical pain as well as woe, ill, or misery. The Greeks did have a way of isolating bodily pain, if necessary, although it was only ever a short elision to a more general concept of suffering. In the Iliad, talk of όδύνη (odune) is never far away from the general state of anguish that undergirds the epic, and the same is true of the famous Herculean scream in Sophocles’ Trachiniae. The poisoned robe that slowly kills the hero in a prolonged fit of agony puts Heracles interchangeably in bodily pain and woeful misery (όδύνη and άλγος). 

The Greek term πάθος (pathos) denotes suffering or experience and, in its original meaning, the adjective ‘pathetic’ was an appeal at an emotional level. In Aristotle’s rhetoric, pathos causes pleasure or pain in an audience, as well as in its producer, depending on which emotions are mobilised. The possibility of pain without injury is clear, and it is closely entangled with affective states. As a central element of the rhetorical triad that included ethos and logos, we can assume that through pathos the potential for the feeling of painful woe was built into rhetorical emotional appeals. Aristotle goes so far as to say that the person who is angry ‘suffers pain’ (λυπεῖται). Here we see the elision of grief or vexation with bodily pain in the word λύπη (lupé). If we pursue this further, finding the Latin derivation of pathos, through πάσχειν (pashein), in the word passio, we see the continued conflation of the emotional and the physical, of suffering and pain. If the Romans emphasised the emotional level of pain through passio, they also, like the Greeks, had a generally holistic approach to the concept of pain that included what we have tended to divide into mental and physical categories. The Latin dolor is preserved in the French douleur, the Spanish dolor, and the Italian dolore. Originally, it could stand for physical pain, as well as grief, anguish, sorrow and resentment. To some extent, this conflation has been preserved in the vernacular.

The categorical vernacular conflation of old is not limited to Western civilisation. In Late Imperial China, for example, there is a rich overlapping of physical, emotional, sensational and moral categories, with an interplay of characters such as 痛 (tong), 苦 (ku), and the portmanteau 痛苦 (tongku), denoting respectively ‘painful’, ‘suffering’ and together, something like ‘anguish’. In India, the Hindi word दर्द (dard) stands for a raft of different degrees of suffering, from uneasiness to torture and from mental distress to grief to anguish. A correlate would be the word दुःख (duḥkh), which often translates as sorrow or grief, but which can signify pain just the same. It has ancient roots in Sanskrit, connoting suffering on a spiritual level, but when deployed in compound terms can indicate the whole range of pain from a cut to a cramp to a calamity. I begin with this semantic journey to emphasise both an enduring conceptual continuity in the understanding of pain, and to highlight the seismic rupture in this understanding that radically altered what it meant to be in pain, to be treated for pain, and to treat for pain (medically) in modernity. That rupture indicates an historical separation of vernacular knowledge of pain from medical specialism about pain.

Before reaching that separation I will say a few words on pain in the religious and theological context of medieval and early modern Europe up to the time of the rupture. Ecce Homo – behold the man – are the words associated with Pontius Pilate upon presenting the bloodied, tortured and pained body of Christ to the assembled masses, prior to crucifixion (John 19:5). The images associated with this scene became emblematic of virtuous suffering, and of the theological importance for humans to endure bodily pain. The representation of Christ’s passion in this moment has been preserved by the art world in the figure of the vir dolorum, or the man of pains, which has reached us variously in Europe as the ‘man of sorrows’ or the Schmerzensmann, which depicts a hurt beyond the mere physical. The wounds, the blood, the instruments of torture are all figures that invite reflection on a suffering that goes beyond the mortification of flesh.

Pain was a central pillar in Christian religious practice from the Roman world to the Counter Reformation, and arguably beyond. As Javier Moscoso and others have pointed out, pain was foundational for medieval and early modern piety, as part of an ascetic quest to imitate the ultimate pain in Christ’s passion. It was a pain not merely to be endured, but to be sought after, enhanced in any way imaginable, and, sometimes literally, sanctified. The imitation of the passion was celebrated in the lives of the Christian martyrs, whose placid countenances in the face of horrible tortures served as proof of the intervention of the saints. Meanwhile, such tortures informed medieval and early modern systems of justice and punishment. Long before pain came to be considered useful from an evolutionary point of view, pain was considered useful from moral, spiritual and judicial points of view. Religious life was dominated by the meaningful fact of being and coming to be in pain. No human pain could reach the extent of Christ’s suffering on behalf of humanity, but to embrace pain after the fashion of Christ was to offset sin and therefore reduce the amount of suffering after death. In this sense, pain was considered by many to be a blessing, or an unmitigated good, since it promised a swifter route to redemption in the afterlife. It would have been heretical, given this view, to seek to desensitise oneself to pain. Instead, people were to steel themselves to live with and through pain. As Esther Cohen has pointed out, this theological stance was the only way to resolve a tangible and all too readily observable ubiquity of suffering with the notion of an omnipresent Providence.

Doubtless this narrative is familiar, but I hope you acknowledge that already we have an account of pain that differs markedly from the kind of mechanistic or utilitarian discourse that would have all pain be bad or unpleasant, and reducible to the nervous system. I contend that the experience of being in pain in this context must have been completely different to the experience of being in pain in a secular, modern, medical context. Neuroscience is providing us with extremely convincing evidence to suggest that what pain feels like – that is, the meaning ascribed to being in pain that defines how pain is experienced – is affectively constructed. We should seriously entertain the notion of pain as ecstasy, pain as piety or a feeling of closeness to God, and pain as pleasure. When such things crop up in the historical record they should be entertained at face value and not merely as rhetorical. I’ll say more about this in a couple of minutes.

The rupture in conceptual understandings of pain is usually ascribed to Descartes, but I want to do him some justice before condemning him. Descartes’ human was, in fact, not a separable entity of body and soul so long as the body was alive, but a union of body-mind or body-soul, which could not be reduced to its components. True, in his Meditations, Descartes insisted that the thinking thing (res cogitans) did not depend on a body, but when Descartes’ body was affected by pain, he felt it; that is, at the level of the rational soul – a thinking thing – there was a disturbance (of thought), caused by the disruption or injury of the body with which the soul was conjoined. He talked of an ‘admixture’ (permixtione) of mind and body when it came to the senses (e.g. hunger or pain). The human body in pain was not merely a reflex mechanism akin to a bell on the end of a rope, but a body-mind that only felt pain because the mind was inseparable from its corporeal seat. If it were otherwise, according to Descartes, the human thinking thing would look upon bodily injury (lesion) as the pilot of a vessel would look upon a damaged boat. This account is complex, rich, and useful.

But. This image, added to the Meditations later, in combination with what Descartes said about animals being like clocks or soulless automata, prevailed. A simplistic reading of the image, contrary to what Descartes actually wrote about pain, has been enormously influential in modern medical science, beginning the search for a mechanical pain pathway. It rests on the assumption that injury = pain and that reactionary movements away from the cause of pain are the results of nervous stimulation, like a bell on the end of a rope suddenly being pulled. As science became increasingly secular and as the soul retreated into the background, so the primacy of physical pain emerged. We have lived with this vision more or less ever since. Ironically, science’s loss of interest in the soul allowed animals into the realm of beings that feel pain, but when physiologists recognised that pain was an unpleasant experience in humans and animals alike, they nevertheless set out on Descartes’ path to find the ‘wheels and springs’ that made pain work.

Modern biomedical theories of pain were preoccupied with the ‘pain pathway’ – the specific mechanism by which pain is detected in the periphery and transmitted, via the spinal cord, to the brain. It was based on assumptions that intensity of injury directly correlated with intensity of pain, and that certain nerves were specifically involved in sending pain messages to the brain. There is a kind of comfortable intuitiveness about such assumptions, but they have been conclusively found to be completely incorrect. Essentially what we see in modern medicine is the parceling out of physical pain related to injury and mental pain, which really did not belong to biomedical concerns. Even though this began to change in the 1960s, we are essentially still living with this dualism in the way medicine is practiced. It has been to the detriment of countless millions of people suffering with chronic pain syndromes and, throughout the twentieth century, saw the moral fibre or character of the war wounded called into question as they continued to suffer from the traumatic effects of combat, whether physically injured or not. Pick up a standard medical text book on pain and you will still find, as a sort of rhetorical Cartesian hangover, a tendency to label nerves that detect injury as pain detectors, which send pain signals to the brain. Such rhetorical slippages have been unsupported since 1965, but they persist and they continue to affect medical practice.

What happened in 1965? Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall published their new theory of the ‘gate control mechanism’, which in turn fostered neuroscientific research that revolutionised understandings of what pain is. Here is the circuit-board in the spinal cord. But the mechanism was coupled with a fuzzier idea that promised the reintroduction of something immaterial, or beyond the human, to make sense of the variability of pain experience. The gate control is essentially a processing centre in the spinal cord that processes signals coming from the periphery in conjunction with signals descending from the brain. It determines what signals make it to the brain to be interpreted as pain. Crucially, the receipt of injury signals from the periphery are only allowed through the gate in conjunction with evaluative cognitive and emotional involvement. The social context and an appraisal of threat determine how pain feels: what it meaningfully is. Pain is indistinguishable from the fear, anxiety, anger, or ecstasy that comes with it.

            
This has been confirmed by study of those people with rare cases of pain asymbolia, or congenital analgesia. This is a genetic condition that renders its ‘sufferer’ unable to ascribe any meaning to painful states. Injurious stimuli are perceived plainly as pressure, cutting, cramping, etc., but the person who perceives these things is indifferent to them. Research has shown that so-called ‘pain centres’ in the brain do, in fact, ‘fire’ in these people when given painful stimuli, but their ‘affective centres’ do not. It is precisely because there is no emotional context to the physical problem that the pain does not register as a problem. Far from being advantageous, people with congenital analgesia tend not to live very long, precisely because they are indifferent to the pain that comes after injury. If there is an evolutionary benefit for pain it is in restricting movement and in protecting those parts that need time to heal. A person with congenital analgesia does not limp when wounded in the leg, and would indifferently go on throwing a ball with a broken arm. This failure to conserve an injury – an affective failure – has the effect of wearing out bones, joints and muscles at a much greater rate than somebody who could feel pain in a ‘normal’ way. Pain, to put it in plain terms, keeps us alive. It depends, when ordinarily perceived, on what the neuroscientists call affect.

Neuroscientists have provided further evidence of this by demonstrating that specific brain activity typically observed when painfully injured roughly corresponds with brain activity when feeling ‘social pain’. Despite some worthy and necessary scepticism about what we are seeing when we look at an fMRI scan of a brain, there can be no question that parts of the brain strongly related to affective or emotional behaviour are involved in pain states, and that these parts of the brain are also involved under stimuli that replicate the affective conditions of pain, but which do not involve any physical harm. In other words, the thing that gives pain meaning – that makes pain painful – can be observed in situations where the body is completely uncompromised. In a now famous test Naomi Eisenberger tested the effect of social exclusion among a peer group. Using a computer game of ‘cyberball’, in which players passed a ball to each other while being scanned, Eisenberger was able to show that being excluded from the game caused brain activity similar to what one would expect to see in conditions of physical pain. Those who felt excluded went through an emotional ordeal that looked, for all intents and purposes, the same as physical pain. The meaning-making processes that are part and parcel of experiencing physical pain are the same when experiencing such things as exclusion, bullying, grief. A broken heart – the archetypical cliché of emotional pain – turns out to be painful in the same sense as a broken leg (although with different consequences, of course). If hurt feelings have been, since time immemorial, a colloquial commonplace, contemporary medicine has started down the road of providing neuroscientific verification of this fact. Ronald Melzack has, much more recently, pushed the implications of his research even further, and coined the neuromatrix theory of pain. Key to this theory is the insistence that experience is not present anywhere, but is created in the brain.

Pain is output of the brain, not input from the periphery. Melzack forcefully states that injury is not pain. Pain is a quality produced in the brain, and is not reconcilable with, or reducible to, injury per se. The neuromatrix theory posits the production of a neurosignature of the whole body – an internal neuro ‘image’ or ‘pattern’ of the body understood as the self – which is ever-present. While the particulars of an individual’s neuromatrix may be genetically programmed, it is nevertheless plastic, being formed and informed by a number of factors that together produce a sense of the self: sensory inputs, including aural and visual, are components; affective and emotional states, which are themselves forged in the crucible of culture, play a part; the meanings and values attached to body parts, proportions, postures, and movements – some of it instinctive, some of it culturally prescribed – are factored in. All these inputs are processed and, in Melzack’s analogy, ‘arranged’ into a symphonic output that equates to the body-self. A cut in the leg may or may not be painful, but I know it is a cut in my leg because of the neurosignature imprint of my neuromatrix. The neuromatrix promises the collapse of both Cartesian dualism and the distance between biomedicine and phenomenology. The brain is not merely a machine, an automaton, or a computer. The brain is plastic, subject to change, and influenced by the world in which it is situated.

This research, I think, casts the history of pain – replete with seemingly inaccessible allusions to religious ecstasy, sexual pleasure and agonies of the soul – into a new light. What might seem like metaphor or rhetoric on face value might actually be a faithful recording of the experience of pain from distinct historical and subjective perspectives. The history of pain is so rich – I’ve barely skimmed the surface of a tiny fraction of it here, that I think it bears re-visiting with a commitment to embrace the unfamiliar as, for want of a better word, authentic. Moreover, that rich history should be sufficient for biomedicine to give up its quest for a definition of pain. It is emotional, historical, contextual. This observation thrusts the emphasis back on to the subjective experience of pain. Doctors’ most reliable source for what their patients are going through is not an fMRI scanner, a prescribed pain questionnaire, or a premeditated search for a lesion, but lies in who the patient is and in what they say and do, combined with an appreciation of their circumstances and the societal prescriptions for what can and should be expressed and what cannot. In short, doctors need to become literate in the pain practices – which is to say the emotional practices – of the people around them. Maybe historians of emotion can help with that.


Pictures: Bernard Picart, The Death of Hercules, 1733; Lucas Cranach the Elder, Christ as Man of Sorrows [Schmerzensmann], before 1537; The pain pathway, from René Descartes, Traite de l’homme, 1664; Gate Control Mechanism, Melzack and Wall, Science, 1965; ‘Social and Physical Pain Produce Similar Brain Responses’, Eisenberger, Lieberman and Williams, Science, 2003; ‘Pain and the Neuromatrix’, Melzack, Journal of Dental Education, 2001.

A Shot in the Arm

Juggling multiple projects, it is perhaps unsurprising that one sometimes tries to catch all the knives in one hand. The release of a policy position-paper from the World Health Organisation on pain mitigation during child-vaccination procedures brought everything into focus recently, making me think there’s a unifying principle to my work after all.

The release of Edward Jenner is only two weeks away (that makes him sound like a hell hound, which maybe is apt), so I’ve become a sort of vaccine activist in the form of Jenner’s ghost (@EdwdJenner on Twitter). In the meantime I’m finishing off a book on pain for Oxford University Press, due in December. Lurking in the background is the daunting prospect of writing the first textbook on the history of emotions for Manchester University Press, due at the end of next year. And my book on the practical applications of Darwinian sympathy is done, dusted and on its way to the University of Illinois Press, replete with a chapter on the evolutionary rationale for compulsory vaccination.

Concerned that anxiety increases the pain of childhood vaccination, which in turn leads to fall-off rates for immunization programmes, the WHO sets out guidelines for a smooth and pain-reduced process. Interestingly, they don’t think that topical anaesthetics are worth the cost and find no evidence that orally ingested painkillers make any difference to the pain of being injected. Rather, a programme of calmness, distraction and neutral language is promoted. Caregivers are to be present throughout. Where appropriate, infants should be breastfed immediately prior to injection. Vaccinators should be even-tempered and well-informed. They should stick to straightforward speech that neither alarms nor falsely reassures (we can all see through it). There ought to be a plentiful supply of toys. It’s essentially a recipe for anxiety elimination for the reduction of pain.

Probably not what the WHO has in mind: Major and Mrs Padmore inoculating against plague in the bazaar in Mandalay, Burma, now Myanmar, 1906. Wellcome Library, London

What is striking about the WHO’s advice is the degree to which they accept and endorse a working definition of pain that includes, in fact depends on, emotion. I’ve been beating a drum for a while now about the way humans make meaning out of pain, arguing that things hurt according to the extent to which we fear them. Pain is not simply a mechanical nervous circuit, where pain experience is directly proportional to painful stimulus. Humans make pain according to emotional appraisals of the meaning of bodily harm, and this dynamic involves both the affective processes of the brain and an understanding of the world and its particular and contingent articles of anxiety. There is no universal elicitor of fear; no object that is intrinsically fearful. Meaning is made – pain is made – in cultural and historical context.

David Hume knew all this in the 1730s:

Were I present at any of the more terrible operations of surgery, ’tis certain that even before it begun, the preparation of the instruments, the laying of the bandages in order, the heating of the irons, with all the signs of anxiety and concern in the patients and assistants, wou’d have a great effect upon my mind, and excite the strongest sentiments of pity and terror. No passion of another discovers itself immediately to the mind. We are only sensible of its causes and effects. From these we infer the passion: And consequently these give rise to our sympathy.

Watching someone about to endure pain is, in itself, painful to the witness. Anxiety is well known to be ‘contagious’. In turn, the subject of the ‘terrible operation’ sees only victimhood, feeding on the anxious atmosphere at hand. In such circumstances, without something to deaden the sensibilities, doubtless the pain would be heightened. It is heartening to know the WHO has a handle on this, with a complex understanding of the ways in which the management of anxiety will diminish the likelihood of painful experience.

Vaccines, Pain, Emotions: my world to a tee, in an episode from the doctors WHO.

Dr Jenner's Dead Cut

In the summer of 1808, the already famous Gloucestershire doctor, Edward Jenner, was in London, having a miserable time. The inventor of vaccine inoculation against smallpox was stuck in the City, waiting on the interminable bureaucracy of Parliament to finalise the details for the National Vaccine Establishment. He had many enemies: anti-vaccination pamphleteers who thought his ideas were eyewash; other vaccinators who coveted his glory; and personal nemeses who seemed to block his every move. Holed up in a place he abhorred, Jenner appealed to his friends for succour, but found them wanting. He perceived his opponents, ‘by the most abominable falsities’, endeavouring ‘to ruin my private character’. So much he could bear, ‘but when I find that no friend has step’d forth even to hold an Umbrella over my head it makes me feel miserable’. He went home at the end of the year, only to find out that events had unfolded to his distaste. The new Establishment was to nourish his enemies, and to dishonour Jenner himself. In desperation, he solicited advice: ‘I may most piteously exclaim, what shall I do?’ he asked Thomas Pruen. Pruen’s reply was dismissive: ‘I am sorry for your situation, but can afford you no kind of assistance’. Jenner felt this as a ‘dead Cut’ and told Pruen so:

Dr Jenner's Lancet, Science Museum London, Wellcome Images

What if a Man had met with an old Friend who had tumbled into a Cellar or any other kind of pit & had broke his bones & had pass’d by heedless of his moanings, saying I am sorry for you but cannot stay to help you out, because I have a pressing engagement, that I must attend to in another quarter? Would this have been balsam to his Wounds or a Caustic?

A month later, after some cooling off and some mollifying correspondence, Jenner announced that ‘the Cut is heald’.

Until recently, such talk would have been filed under metaphor and left at that. Jenner was miserable, but not in pain. The ‘cut’ wasn’t real. Recent studies on the ways in which pain experience is managed by the brain have begun to change our approach, casting new light on the affective pain utterances of historical actors. We’re now in a position to say, at least tentatively, that Jenner’s misery hurt.

How so? The turn towards affect in both historical studies and the neurosciences has foregrounded the importance of emotions in giving meaning to, or in defining, painful experiences. In fact, without stimulation of the affective centres of the brain, there is no experience, only pain. On the one hand, studies of people with the rare condition of pain asymbolia have found that without affective involvement, pain is meaningless. People with this condition are fully able to sense pain, but completely unable to interpret it. Bodily injury elicits no fear, no anxiety, no compulsion to flee or fight. A hand is put into the flame and it burns, but there is no reason to withdraw it. On the other hand, there are people who have no bodily injury whatsoever, but who feel the effects of, for example, social exclusion, as physical pain. Brain imaging has discovered that brain activity in affective centres under such conditions accords with what you would expect to see in a person suffering a physical injury. In sum, physical pain requires an emotional component in order to be experienced as pain, while certain ‘negative’ emotions are experienced physically as painful.

What’s the point? The science of pain is finally catching up with what sufferers have known all along: when they communicate that their body is in pain, they’re not making it up. But the specifics of the communication are contextually grounded, culturally formed. To take such utterances seriously is to entertain new potentialities in the history of experience. Much of the emotional suffering of the historical record – hysteria, melancholia, nostalgia, for example (to all of which Dr Jenner was prone) – has been under-treated by the history of medicine, in accord with twentieth-century medicine’s dualistic predilections, where pain is physical and suffering is only emotional or psychological. To enter into the historical experiences and meanings of suffering is to open up the possibility of understanding and interpreting the emotional and physical worlds of historical actors. Both the history of the body and the history of mentalités become united in a monistic history of experience that sets out to understand the dynamic relationship among emotions, their expression, bodily sensations and bodily practices.

This post first appeared on Emotions in Dialogue. You can pre-order Edward Jenner here and here. 

Treadmill Punishment

The Victorians knew the meaning of punishment. Among their more arcane penalties was the treadmill – a large wheel turned by a captive human-cum-hamster, to no apparent end. It was designed to wear down prisoners through constant physical exertion and mind-numbing boredom. It was de-humanising, turning the person into part of a meaningless machine that turned only to turn. Across the world, sedentary office lackeys now willingly pay for a similar privilege.

Our forebears would be perplexed in the extreme by our need to contrive exercise. Our lives are such that physical activity might not happen at all in the normal course of things, and the most shocking part of that commonplace is that we do not dispute the fact that it is ‘normal’. Actually, the sedentary existence, broken only by a perceived need to eat enormous amounts of fat and salt, is unique among mammals – an astonishing testament to human conceit, as we have driven ourselves so far from animality that we have bypassed civilisation and emerged as mere automatons. In a last-ditch attempt to wrestle back our dignity, not to mention our waist lines, we mount moving belts and other stationary calorie eaters in order to extend our meaningless existence. It’s amazing to me that boredom is not a bigger killer in the decadent West.

I’m given to reflect on these things because I’ve just spent some time on a treadmill. I only ever go to the gym when I stay in hotels in winter. The street is otherwise my pounding place of choice, where to run is an end in itself, an essential human activity, and a central pillar of our distinctive evolution. Somehow, despite everything, the emptiness of hotel gyms appeals to me, notwithstanding the tedium of the punishment. No jocks; no posturing; no people at all, actually. In the interest of not losing the edge on my fitness, I resort to – become – the machine.

Running Scared?

Over the Christmas holidays in Montreal last year there was a record snow storm. Eighteen inches fell in one day. Immediately afterwards the temperature dropped to a pretty consistent -20 Celsius, give or take wind chill. The city, which usually recovers from winter storms in a single day of ploughing and shovelling, was buried for a week. Perfect weather for running.

From my apartment downtown to the top of Mount Royal is an elevation gain of 495 feet, over about three-and-a-half miles. It’s not an unchallenging hill run at the best of times, but I’d never actually been up it in deep snow, even at a walk. Coming down is pretty taxing on the knees if you do it consistently, but I had no idea about how it would be on snow and ice. A city, I reasoned, is to be experienced, and laced up.

I was not without appropriate equipment. Mrs. VB had sprung for the running crampons for Christmas for the very purpose, and strapping them on is the nearest a runner gets to the girding of loins. Layers of wicking clothing lay between me and the elements. The first part of the run is usually on sidewalks, but they were completely buried (as were the parked cars), so I struck out into the road, which at least had some tyre tracks to follow. The first half mile was maybe the hardest I’ve run. The snow was thigh deep in places, and getting the legs up and out of it soon started to burn. Meanwhile the feet were completely numb.

The main path up Parc Avenue was buried, but there was a clearing of sorts through the park to the west of the street, some of which had been ploughed for fire trucks. A mile or so in was the mountain trail – a smoothly ploughed path of crunchy ice. Near the bottom, the sledding community was in its element, but they soon petered out. After that there were skiers (winter’s cyclists, similarly annoying), snow shoers, and the hardy winter foot soldiers. One or two other runners were braving it. Thighs easing up; feet coming back to life.

Two thirds of the way up, the sun broke around the bend of the mountain path and lit up the winter like a torch. I’ve never seen a brighter light and the sheer beauty of the spectacle lulled me into a temporary forgetfulness of the lunacy of it all. Around the next bend, high up now, the wind could have cut a man in two, blowing snow sideways off the drifting piles like a sandstorm, and just as sharp, with the windchill factor now at around -30. The only people up here were other idiots.

Made it to the top. A glorious scene of shimmering metal and glass, surrounded by ice. Going down was quick, hard on the feet, and heavy on the thighs again once I reached those high drifts. Seven brutal miles later I was back, layered with ice and frost, ready to thaw, and eat.

Never again? Well, not until the next day.

Ecce Homo

Behold the man. Flesh and blood. Broken. Passionate.

Baldung Grien, Schmerzensmann [Man of Sorrows], 1511

In one of the more curious English etymological journeys from Greek (pathos), ‘passion’ now stands for ardent enthusiasm or, worse, lust. But in its oldest and most enduring sense, passion refers to suffering. It is a corporeal ordeal bound in an emotional expression of anguish. It is pain, of the body, of the heart.

I’d have made a hopeless utilitarian. There are plenty of them still kicking about, but I pity their plight. ‘All pain is bad, umkay?’ The sentiment has a hollow, modern ring suggestive of double-entry bookkeeping and facts in boxes. It seems inescapable to me that the human has always been defined in some way through or against pain and suffering. From pain we derive meaning, sense of purpose, sense of gain and loss, sense of identity. The significance of flesh and blood – our substance – is its tenuousness. We are morbid creatures. We tear and bleed. Around us and in us ‘nature’ struggles. Out of Victorian conceit we’ve been wont to talk of the survival of the fittest, beating our chests as if the civilised world somehow had a monopoly over the category ‘fit’. The flipside of that expression is the suffering of the majority, the struggle, through pain, to death.

This is not meant to be bleak. Through struggle we strive, and in striving we become. Pain moves us, physically, affectively. It holds up to us our limits and dares us to transcend them. Through adversity comes clarity of purpose. The worse the ordeal we come through, the more resolute we are. Just as there is no courage without fear, there is no purpose without pain. Think of all the people who claim they will ‘re-evaluate’ their lives after painful experiences. There is truth in cliché.

Ecce Homo: Behold the man. Through passion – in pain – significant.