The Pain Chronicles (38 page)

Diocles of Carystos
: Quoted in Ibid., 24. His name is also spelled Carystus.

“God’s own medicine”
: Sir William Osler quoted in Michael Bliss,
William Osler: A Life in Medicine
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 365.

“causeth deepe deadly sleapes”
: William Bullein,
Bullein’s Bulwarke of Defence Against All Sickness Soarenesse and Woundes That Doe Dayly Assaulte Mankinde
(1579), quoted in Booth,
Opium: A History
, 26.

higher survival rate after ancient Peruvian trepanations
: See discussion in Richard Rudgley,
Lost Civilizations of the Stone Age
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 131.

compensate their slaves with more cocaine
: See Steven B. Karch,
A History of Cocaine
(London: Royal Society of Medicine Press, 2003), 17.

“When anyone suffers from toothache”
: Cited in Donald Meichenbaum,
Cognitive-Behavior Modification
(New York: Springer, 1977), 170–71.

“the blessed delight”
: Quoted in Fülöp-Miller,
Triumph Over Pain
, 19.

“I was absent from that part”
: Dhan Gopal Mukerji,
My Brother’s Face
, quoted in E. S. Ellis,
Ancient Anodynes: Primitive Anesthesia and Allied Conditions
(London: W. Heinemann, 1946), 18.

“I soon had recourse”
: Immanuel Kant,
Religion and Rational Theology
, trans. Allen W. Wood, George Di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 320–21.

mesmerism: See Alison Winter,
Mesmerized
:
Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and a briefer discussion in Dormandy’s
The Worst of Evils
, 195–99.

“This Yankee dodge”
: Quoted in Stanley,
For Fear of Pain
, 294.

“There can be few”
: Ibid., 290.

“These phenomena I know to be real . . . independent of imagination”
: Ibid., 289.

“a ready abandonment of the will”
: See
Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine
70 (1851): 84–85.

“immoral tendency”
: James Braid,
Neurypnology; or, The Rationale of Nervous Sleep, Considered
in Relation with Animal Magnetism
(London: John Churchill, 1843), 75–76. Braid distinguishes his practice of hypnotism from that of mesmerists because his practice does not depend on the magnetic emanations—or any other power—of the hypnotist.

E. M. Papper theorizes
: E. M. Papper,
Romance, Poetry, and Surgical Sleep: Literature Influences Medicine
(Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995), 136.

“necessary to our existence”
: Quoted in Stanley,
For Fear of Pain
, 283.

“To escape pain in surgical operations”
: Quoted in “A History of the Gift of Painless Surgery” in
The Atlantic Monthly
78 (1896): 679.

“appears capable of destroying physical pain”
: Cited in Paul G. Barash, et al.,
Clinical Anesthesia
(Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2009), 5.

“the air in heaven”
: See Martin S. Pernick,
A Calculus of Suffering
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 64.

Ether frolics became the rage
: Ibid., 64–65.

“In science the credit goes”
: Cited in William Osler,
Counsels and Ideals from the Writings of William Osler
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1921), 294.

at least three Americans were experimenting
: For accounts of these experiments, see Dormandy,
The Worst of Evils
, 202–26.

doctor from Georgia
: In 1842 Crawford Long, of Danielsville, Georgia, excised a cyst from a patient’s neck using ether anesthesia.

“the wonderful dream”
: Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach, quoted in “Pain Relief: Fact or Fancy?” by Prithvi Raj,
Regional Anesthesia and Pain Medicine
15 (July/August, 1990): 157–69.

“The discovery that the inhaling”
: Henry Jacob Bigelow, “Address at the Dedication of the Ether Monument,” in
Surgical Anesthesia; Addresses, and Other Papers
(Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1900), 101.

“questionable attempt to abrogate”
and
“destruction of consciousness”
: These criticisms are from physicians’ letters cited in
The Obstetric Memoirs and Contributions of James Y. Simpson
, 616. Simpson responds in defense of the benefits of anesthesia. See also general discussion in Pernick,
A Calculus of Suffering
.

“this would not be worth the consideration”
: Cited in Betty MacQuitty,
Victory Over Pain: Morton’s Discovery of Anesthesia
(New York: Taplinger, 1971), 42.

“the insensibility
of the patient
”: See
Military Medical and Surgical Essays: Prepared for the United States Sanitary Commission
(Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott & Co., 1864), 393.

“a mere operator”
: See Edward Lawrie, “The Teaching of Anesthetics” in
The Lancet
157 (1901): 65.

“a remedy of doubtful safety”
: Isaac Parish, “Annual Report on Surgery, read before the College of Physicians” (College of Physicians of Philadelphia, November 2, 1847).

“Pain during operations”
: See “Injurious Effects of the Inhalation of Ether,”
Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal
(July 1847): 258.

“The shock of the knife”
: See Stanley,
For Fear of Pain
, 305.

“slavery of etherization”
: Quoted in Glucklich,
Sacred Pain
, 188.

Henry Bigelow himself soberly warned
: Henry Bigelow, “Insensibility During Surgical Operations Produced by Inhalation,” in
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
35 (1846): 309–17.

“perfect insensibility to pain”
: See “Etherization in Surgical Operations,”
The Lancet
49 (January 16, 1847): 75.

Sir James Young Simpson pioneered the use of chloroform
: See Stanley,
For Fear of Pain
, 302.

“if the patient has a very great dread”
: By the mid-1850s, Syme himself had become a proponent, insisting to other surgeons that pain “most injuriously exhausts the nervous energy of a weak patient.” See Linda Stratmann,
Chloroform
(Stroud, United Kingdom: History Press, 2003), 100.

“Pain is the mother’s safety”
: See discussion of labor pains in Charles D. Meigs,
Obstetrics: The Science and the Art
, 5th Edition (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1856), 372–73.

in “toil”
: See
The Obstetric Memoirs and Contributions of James Y. Simpson
, 549 and 551.

“anesthesia
à la Reine”: See Hannah Pakula,
An Uncommon Woman
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997), 123.

“I dressed him, God healed him”
: Quoted in Dormandy,
The Worst of Evils
, 104.

“Pain never comes where it can serve no good purpose”
: Quoted in Bending,
Representation of Bodily Pain
, 65. For further discussion of the split between science and religion, see Bending, 5–81.

III. TERRIBLE ALCHEMY: PAIN AS DISEASE

there are only 2,500:
See Brenda Bauer et al., “U.S. Board Certified Pain Physician Practices: Uniformity and Census Data of Their Locations,”
The Journal of Pain
8 (March 2007): 244–50.

just 5 percent of chronic pain patients:
See Roxanne Nelson, “Few Chronic Pain Patients See a Specialist,”
Internal Medicine News,
October 1, 2006.

first comprehensive textbook
: Bonica’s first edition was published in 1953, but it has subsequently been revised and updated twice. See John David Loeser, John J. Bonica et al.,
Bonica’s Management of Pain
(Philadelphia: Lippincott Williams & Wilkins, 2001).

a $1.5 million judgment
: The case is
Bergman v. Chin.
For a good summary, see Bruce David White,
Drugs, Ethics and Quality of Life
(Binghamton, N.Y.: Haworth Press, 2007), 115–18.

“If for some disease a great many different remedies are proposed”
: See Anton Chekhov,
The Cherry Orchard
(New York: Samuel French), 18.

sleep poorly
: In a survey by the National Sleep Foundation, two-thirds of chronic pain sufferers reported unrefreshing or poor sleep.

symptoms of mental illness
: See, for example, Emma Young, “Are Bad Sleeping Habits Driving Us Mad?”
The New Scientist
, February 18, 2009.

deconditioning and guarding behavior
: For a good review of the mechanisms by which pain syndromes can cause deconditioning, see “Disuse and Physical Disconditioning in Lower Back Pain” in Gordon J. G. Asmundson et al.,
Understanding and Treating Fear of Pain
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).

no specific diagnosis
: See I. Abraham et al., “Lack of Evidence-Based Research for Idiopathic Low Back Pain: The Importance of a Specific Diagnosis,”
Archives of Internal Medicine
162 (2002): 1442–44.

up to 85 percent of such cases
: Richard A. Deyo et al., “What Can the History and Physical Examination Tell Us About Low Back Pain?”
Journal of the American Medical Association
268 (1992): 760–65.

“Whatever pain achieves”
: See Scarry,
The Body in Pain
, 4.

“no words for the shiver and the headache”
: See Virginia Woolf, “On Being Ill,” in
Selected Essays
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 102.

set by evolution at a relatively fixed point
: For a good explanation of the nociceptive threshold, see Christine Brooks,
Nursing Adults: The Practice of Caring
(Philadelphia: Mosby, 2003), 112.

a full one-third of damaged disks
: O. L. Osti, “MRI and Discography of Annular Tears and Intervertebral Disk Degeneration: A Prospective Clinical Comparison,”
Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery
74 (1992): 431–35.

nearly half of patients
: Cited in James M. Cox,
Low Back Pain: Mechanism, Diagnosis and Treatment
(Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1998), 407.

attached a small device to the base of subjects’ thumbnails
: Drs. Clauw and Gracely presented this evidence at an October 2002 meeting of the American College of Rheumatology. They have published their findings in separate papers, including R. H. Gracely et al., “Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Evidence of Augmented Pain Processing in Fibromyalgia,”
Arthritis & Rheumatism
46 (2002): 1333–43, and “Evidence of Augmented Central Pain Processing in Idiopathic Chronic Low Back Pain,”
Arthritis & Rheumatism
50 (2004): 613–23.