The Pain Chronicles by Melanie Thernstrom

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) It taught me how to see what was really behind our cultural discomfort with invisible illness. This book was the catalyst for The Invisible Kingdom. Writing against the idea of the 'cancer personality,' she starkly admonishes us not to confound biological illness with psychology.

In this brief, startlingly original, and audacious essay, Sontag argued that we often psychologize and stigmatize illnesses that are poorly understood. Illness as Metaphor by Susan Sontag (1978) Below, she recommends six works that shaped her thinking. Having initially charted her struggle with chronic neck pain for the New York Times Magazine, Thernstrom knows of what she writes, ultimately offering a well-crafted argument for why doctors should stop treating pain as a symptom and start seeing it as a potentially curable disease.Meghan O'Rourke is the author of The Invisible Kingdom, a 2022 National Book Award finalist, which explores a 'silent epidemic' of chronic illness that afflicts tens of millions of Americans. Her thorough history of anguish is full of cringe-worthy anecdotes: In the 1800s, body parts were regularly lopped off without an anesthetic, and today, Hindu pilgrims skewer themselves in the name of their gods. Thernstrom skillfully paints a portrait of pain as an inescapable, all-consuming demon, though for those lucky enough to have experienced the sensation only as a momentary affliction, such never-ending hurt may sound foreign or even fake. If you are one of the more than 70 million Americans who suffer from chronic hurt, The Pain Chronicles could very well be the first time you hear from someone who speaks your language.

Yet in the U.S., there is only one board-certified pain specialist for every 25,000 pain patients. Pain is one of the most common reasons we go to the doctor. By Melanie Thernstrom Farrar, Straus & Giroux 364 pages