The Pain Chronicles by Melanie Thernstrom

This remains a minority view that includes physicians specializing in treating pain but few of their medical colleagues who often look suspiciously on these patients. Like all chronic diseases, treatment helps but rarely cures. Over time, untreated pain causes visible damage to the brain and spinal cord that maintains the pain. Chronic pain is not protective its intensity bears no relation to tissue injury and may seem to arise in its absence.

Thernstrom, however, examines chronic pain, a condition affecting nearly 20 percent of Americans. Most readers know that pain is a protective reaction to tissue damage that resolves when damage heals, but this only defines acute pain from injuries and self-limited diseases. Searching for relief and understanding, her writing alternates between a frustrating medical odyssey, an overview of pain research and the surprisingly varied meaning of pain throughout history, religion, art and literature. Ten years ago, New York Times Magazine contributor Thernstrom ( Halfway Heaven: Diary of a Harvard Murder, 1997, etc.) noticed severe pain in her neck and shoulder, which came and went but then persisted, sometimes unbearably. Buy it here.An intriguing investigation of chronic pain that combines expert opinion, philosophy and history with the author's personal struggle. It tells the story of the murder of Trethewey's mother by her abusive ex-husband, and is a model for writing authentically about uncertainty and that which we can never fully know. This searing memoir by a former poet laureate is about writing of trauma that resists language and is hard to see clearly. Memorial Drive: A Daughter's Memoir by Natasha Trethewey (2020)

We can't see what we don't have words for. In this book-length essay, she pointedly notes that we have very little good writing about pain, and lays out the 'poverty' of the English language when it comes to describing the body. Woolf is the master of writing about inner sensation. This book articulated more about being ill than almost anything else I've read. A collection of fragments, it amounts, in a sense, to an eloquent existential outcry.

In the Land of Pain by Alphonse Daudet (1929)Ī brilliant, lapidary work by the 19th-century French novelist who lived with - and died from - tertiary syphilis before the disease was medically understood. I will never forget her riveting accounts of surgery before pain medications and anesthesia. In this hybrid of memoir and research, Thernstrom braids her own story of chronic pain with literary and historical accounts of pain, and incisively lays out how little we understand about chronic pain. The Pain Chronicles by Melanie Thernstrom (2010)