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Ebook The story of pain: Part 2

(BQ) As Joanna Bourke shows in this fascinating investigation, people have come up with many different answers to these questions over time. And a history of pain can tell us a great deal about how we might respond to our own suffering in the present - and, just as importantly, to the suffering of those around us. | 6 Gesture Some acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other symptoms. (Peter Mere Latham, 1837)1 W ords are never enough. Pain is communicated through gestures, inarticulate utterances, facial expressions, posture, and other nonlinguistic movements of the body. A piece of doggerel, published in The London Hospital Gazette in 1900, satirized this aspect of pain in the context of a person having a tooth extracted. Once seated in the dentist’s chair, the patient regresses. He squirms, an’ squeals, an’ screeches, sometimes I gives a shout, I weeps, an’ wails, an’ wriggles, and wags my tongue about. I shrieks, an’ kicks, an’ scratches, and then I tries to bite.2 Some of these gestures are performances, that is, deliberate signs conveyed by people-in-pain seeking sympathy and succour. Others arise from some unconscious realm, rooted in physiological impulses or assimilated involuntarily during processes of socialization. Irrespective of origin, a world of meaning is conveyed in the whimper, the wince, the sweat on the upper lip, the tremor, the shuffle, the shielding motion, the closed fist resting on the bed linen, the compulsive rubbing, and the shrill cry ‘Ouch!’ In the words of an unnamed mother writing in 1819, ‘bodily torture’ was ‘too palpably indicated by the starting dew, the cold brow, the blanched lip, and bloodless cheek’.3 Functional behaviours—such as excessive sleeping or assuming the foetal position in bed—also quietly convey a message of suffering, as do acts that deliberately attempt to suggest that gestures are being suppressed 16 0 g e sture (the stoical pursing of the lips or the stiffened gait, for instance). For convenience, I will be referring to these physiological responses (sweating, pallor, or muscular tension), facial expressions (grimacing), and paralinguistic vocalizations (groaning or screaming) as ‘gestural languages’. It is important, .