Inventing Pain Medicine From The Laboratory To The Clinic

Pain is a pervasive subject in our culture—especially as something to be combatted and conquered. One need only open a magazine or turn on the radio or television to become aware of this fact. But is the widespread interest in pain merely a passing fad or does it reflect the emergence of a new relationship between pain and medicine? Inventing Pain Medicine explores the current state of pain medicine against the background of its historical development. Based on extensive field research, Isabelle Baszanger’s study outlines the first tentative steps to control pain taken in the last years of World War II when a young American anesthesiologist, John J. Bonica, made alleviating the pain of wounded soldiers his mission. Baszanger traces Bonica’s protracted pioneering struggle for recognition of pain as worthy of medical attention in itself, for a definition of pain as more than a diagnostic tool, including differentiation of types of pain and modes of treatment, and for the establishment of specialized multidisciplinary pain clinics. Baszanger also provides an in-depth comparative analysis of the divergent approaches toward pain and its treatment at two clinics in France today, taking into account her observations at consultation sessions as well as many interviews with physicians, clinic staff, and patients. Her ethnographic inquiries are always anchored in socio-historical reflections on the social and conceptual transformations that were necessary to make the invention of pain medicine possible. A pathbreaking effort, this book goes a long way to explain why sufferers of chronic pain had to wait until the end of the twentieth century to find physicians and clinics specializing in the alleviation of their condition.