Species of Compassion: Aesthetics, Anaesthetics, and Pain in the Physiological Laboratory (original) (raw)

Pain and the politics of sympathy, historical reflections, 1760s to 1960s

Astronomy & Astrophysics - ASTRON ASTROPHYS, 2011

In her inaugural lecture, Prof. Bourke will explore the language of pain in Anglo-American societies from the 1760s. Although the communication of pain presents difficulties, she will be arguing that painful worlds are expressed through a rich language of metaphor, simile, metonym, and analogy. Furthermore, these metaphors are based on embodied experiences, dissolving any body/mind distinction. The mind is embodied in the sense that people think via sensorimotor experiences, and the body is "mind-ful". Although there are many consistent metaphors used by people in the past to communicate their suffering, we can also identify shifts in metaphoric use. These shifts tell us a great deal of changes in the meaning and sensation of pain. Finally, Prof. Bourke will conclude by suggesting various reasons why clinical languages of pain might have become "thinner" since the eighteenth century.

The bureaucracy of empathy : vivisection and the question of animal pain in Britain, 1876-1912

2017

This dissertation examines the mutually reinforcing connections between science and law and their construction of pain in British regulation of animal experimentation. It investigates the Home Office's implementation of the Cruelty to Animals Act (1876), the first effort anywhere in the world to impose legal restrictions on vivisection, during the three decades following its enactment. The study ends in 1912 with the findings of a second Royal Commission that evaluated the workings of the Act. The Commission reaffirmed many of the Home Office polices regarding vivisection and their underlying premises. The Act mandated official supervision of scientific experiments that "calculated to give pain" to animal subjects. Implementing the Act therefore necessitated the identification and quantification of pain. This requirement created what I term the "bureaucracy of empathy," an attempt to systemize the understanding of animal suffering through administrative mecha...

The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth–Century English Culture

2000

Annie Howard, 'the "Freak" of art' Oscar Wilde) shared his understandings of the neurology of pain with the scientist, Francis Galton. In a broader scheme, understandings of pain held by theologians and by physiologists and medical practitioners strongly affected the tenability of their counterparts' positions. In the middle of the century, there is no doubt that Christian theology had a firm, though loosening, grip on the courses open to doctors. Vaccination and anaesthesia both had to fight for survival against the Christian belief that intervention in God's world was blasphemous. The pendulum then swung in the other direction as pain lost its place as a natural part in the universe and became, instead, something to be removed or alleviated at all costs. As I shall argue, medicine took on the role of dominant discourse, and added its strength to the changes that were Introduction already under way in the Christian church: if quotidian pain was no longer either necessary or natural, then other sorts of pain, formerly ordained by Godthose of atonement and damnationalso began to lose their analogical rationale. It is no surprise that the Church of England heresy trials in the 1860s, largely brought because of the defendants' refusal to accept eternal damnation, were concurrent with the increasing strength of physiological and neurological knowledge. Whilst these trends, however, were clearly interrelated, it was also the case that there was no general consensus, and that unpopular beliefs were as firmly held as popular ones, as belief refused to bend, in some cases at least, to prevalent scientific formulations. Pain, and the ways in which it was understood and schematised, far from being abstruse, got to the heart of many important Victorian debates and cultural currents. I have already hinted at the changing status of pain and its importance within the English church as a determining factor, but perceptions of pain had other far-reaching implications. The newly acquired ability to control pain, at least to some extent, contributed to the professionalisation of the medical establishment, and, eventually, the displacement of pain as an integral part of life was seen to play a part in the imperialist anxiety that British soldiers were no longer manly enough for the task they were to undertake. The Victorian craze for classification took up the supposed inability of particular groups to feel pain, and used this to specify sufferers' positions on scales of sensitivity, such that degree of civilisation, class, and psychological well-being, were all seen to be predetermined. As I shall make clear in the course of this dissertation, such arguments were intrinsically circular, and rested not on observation or empirical evidence, but rather on supposed similarities to groups already assumed to be insensate. This assumed insensitivity was then used to police the boundaries between different groups, as the ability to feel pain was used as a marker of difference between, for example, the law-abiding and the criminal. My aim throughout has been to bring together understandings of pain (as well as rhetorical strategies for describing pain) drawn from different spheres, and to do this I have brought to the fore practices and collections of ideas that became potent sources

Accepting Pain Over Comfort: Resistance to the Use of Anesthesia in the Mid-19th Century

Journal of Anesthesia History, 2015

News of the successful use of ether anesthesia on October 16, 1846, spread rapidly through the world. Considered one of the greatest medical discoveries, this triumph over man's cardinal symptom, the symptom most likely to persuade patients to seek medical attention, was praised by physicians and patients alike. Incredibly, this option was not accepted by all, and opposition to the use of anesthesia persisted among some sections of society decades after its introduction. We examine the social and medical factors underlying this resistance. At least seven major objections to the newly introduced anesthetic agents were raised by physicians and patients. Complications of anesthesia, including death, were reported in the press, and many avoided anesthesia to minimize the considerable risk associated with surgery. Modesty prevented female patients from seeking unconsciousness during surgery, where many men would be present. Biblical passages stating that women would bear children in pain were used to discourage them from seeking analgesia during labor. Some medical practitioners believed that pain was beneficial to satisfactory progression of labor and recovery from surgery. Others felt that patient advocacy and participation in decision making during surgery would be lost under the influence of anesthesia. Early recreational use of nitrous oxide and ether, commercialization with patenting of Letheon, and the fighting for credit for the discovery of anesthesia suggested unprofessional behavior and smacked of quackery. Lastly, in certain geographical areas, notably Philadelphia, physicians resisted this Boston-based medical advance, citing unprofessional behavior and profit seeking. Although it appears inconceivable that such a major medical advance would face opposition, a historical examination reveals several logical grounds for the initial societal and medical skepticism.

Emotions and the Body in Early Modern Medicine

Emotion Review, 2018

Drawing on Latin treatises, letters, and autobiographical writings, this article outlines the changes in the-thoroughly somaticlearned medical understanding of the emotions (or "affectus/passiones animi") between 1500 and 1800 and their impact on lay experience. The mixture of the four natural humors explained individuals' different propensity to certain emotions. The emotions as such, however, were described primarily as movements of the spirits and the blood towards or away from external objects. The term "e(s)motion" emerged. The final part highlights the 18th-century shift from spirits and blood to the nerves as the principal site of the emotions. Physicians and laypersons alike now associated the emotions closely with the peculiar nervous sensibility and irritability of individuals and groups.

Pain, Pleasure and the Greater Good, Introduction

Pain Pleasure and the Greater Good, from the Panopticon to the Skinner Box and Beyond (Chicago, October 2017)

Motivated by urgent contemporary issues in medical ethics and moral psychology, the book tells the 350-year story of utilitarian philosophy – the doctrine of the greatest happiness for the greatest number – from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan to Richard Thaler’s Nudge. The bulk of the book focuses on utilitarianism in medicine, documenting the nearly two centuries during which doctors and scientists enjoyed unlimited power to determine who should serve as human research subjects. From the 1770s to the 1970s, medical researchers performed the ultimate utilitarian calculation: entrusted to weigh the pain, suffering, and survival of living people against the health, happiness and longevity of future generations. The situation is very different today. Since 1974, the etiquette of informed consent has replaced utilitarianism in ever-widening areas of medical practice, a shift of the utmost practical and theoretical significance. Anyone judged unable to give valid consent is eliminated from the research pool, while elaborate rituals soliciting signatures punctuate even the medical care of bourgeois citizens. And mandatory informed consent keeps growing. It has spread from research to therapy and from life science to social science. It underpins definitions of sexual harassment and rape, and has emerged as the preferred structure for negotiations between nation states and indigenous peoples. On a practical level, informed consent may be the defining ethical framework of our age. From the comfortable perspective of what we might call our ‘Age of Consent,’ it seems obvious that the utility calculations that used to keep medicine supplied with human experimental material were deeply grooved with the prejudices of privilege – of race, class, and education. Pain, Pleasure, and the Greater Good argues that there was also a structural dimension to the problem: even when such cost-benefit reckonings were undertaken with the utmost gravity, sensitivity, and good will, there was no escaping the scientific elitism inherent in utilitarian reasoning. What it boiled down to was this: anyone with little enough to lose was considered fair game in pursuit of scientific progress. Racialized, institutionalized, incarcerated, hospitalized, poor, disabled, and mentally handicapped individuals were deemed to have lives so miserable that they could legitimately be sacrificed to benefit humanity as a whole. The introduction, ‘Diving Into the Wreck,’ opens with the most important medical scandal of the late-twentieth century: the revelation of the ‘Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Male Negro.’ Recounting the day in 1973 when two survivors of the study gave testimony at some Congressional hearings on human experimentation, it suggests that this moment marks an important turning point in the history of medical ethics. The discussion then moves onto the rights and wrongs of Tuskegee, showing how the ethics of this study and, indeed, all human experimentation of the period, were based in the cost-benefit reasoning that is the hallmark of utilitarianism. It argues that the history and philosophy of medical research cannot be properly understood without an appreciation of the centrality of utilitarianism to the whole enterprise. It goes on to introduce all the major themes and players of the story, including the emergence of the idea of patient autonomy, the importance of pain-pleasure psychology to utilitarian ethics, and the question of who makes medical decisions.