Authoring Pain: Fragmentation and Autofiction in Maggie Nelson's Bluets.

This article analyzes Maggie Nelson's Bluets (2009) as a prominent example of the fragmentary narration that can result from the experience of pain and loss. I demonstrate how Nelson's disparate ruminations on her obsession for the color blue, her heartbreak, and her quadriplegic friend's chronic pain defy the superimposition of a teleological plot over these experiences, in favor of episodic reading and sporadic not-knowing. Still, the autofictional nature of the text-with its alternatively overbearing and elusive authorial presence-challenges any naïve emotional investment in it. Focusing on Nelson's narration of her quadriplegic friend's experience of chronic pain, I conclude by highlighting how Bluets calls for a reconsideration of the reader's stance vis-à-vis the description of suffering, as well as of simplistic critical approaches to illness narratives as life-writing.

Anguish in Language: Pain as a Biocultural Experience in Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric.

Claudia Rankine's Citizen: An American Lyric (2014) represents physical pain as a multidimensional experience entwined with history, language, and culture. By linking descriptions of anti-Black racist encounters with the imagery of somatic aches, Rankine blurs the boundaries between psychological suffering and physical distress to offer readers a nuanced depiction of the way racist discourse can both cause and, most crucially, shape one's private perception of corporeal agony. She zeros in on the experience of headaches to represent the interwoven relationship between the psycholinguistic contours of thought and bodily hurt, insisting that physical pain is more than a physiological alarm whose essence lies outside of language and culture.

Understanding Opioid Actions, Pain and Analgesia: A Tribute to Dr. Gavril Pasternak.

This special issue is a tribute to our mentor, colleague and friend, Gavril W. Pasternak, MD, PhD. Homage to the breadth and depth of his work (~ 450 publications) over a 40 career in pharmacology and medicine cannot be captured fully in one special issue, but the 22 papers collected herein represent seven of the topics near and dear to Gav's heart, and the colleagues, friends and mentees who held him near to theirs. The seven themes include: (1) sites and mechanisms of opioid actions in vivo; (2) development of novel analgesic agents; (3) opioid tolerance, withdrawal and addiction: mechanisms and treatment; (4) opioid receptor splice variants; (5) novel research tools and approaches; (6) receptor signaling and crosstalk in vitro; and (7) mentorship. This introduction to the issue summarizes contributions and includes formal and personal remembrances of Gav that illustrate his personality, warmth, and dedication to making a difference in patient care and people's lives.

Debby Hamilton, MD, MPH: Research on Pain.

No Abstract Available.

Guia prático para o manejo da dor / Guia prático para o manejo da dor

O estudo da dor e suas particularidades é de grande importância para o tratamento de diversas patologias e para a melhora na qualidade de vida dos pacientes. A maioria das disfunções orgânicas tem a dor como um ponto importante da sua manifestação. Dessa maneira, é justificável a elaboração de conteúdo para auxiliar os profissionais da saúde no entendimento e tratamento das principais causas de dores agudas e crônicas. Este livro foi elaborado com o objetivo de servir como um guia prático para o manejo da dor por profissionais e acadêmicos de Medicina. Engloba temas como conceitos e aspectos biopsicossociais da dor, além de questões mais complexas como a fisiologia da dor e o tratamento medicamentoso com o arsenal terapêutico existente. Finalmente, também trata dos diversos tipos de dor mais prevalentes e o conhecimento básico que envolve seu manejo.

Pinpricks: Needling, numbness, and temporalities of pain.

Acupuncture analgesia appeared relatively straightforward. A patient laid awake as the practitioner needled selected sites on the body to induce numbness for surgery. Numerous reports emerging from China in the 1970s featured men and women resting on operating tables, smiling into the camera, surrounded by doctors who attended to the excised region-the esophagus, brain, gut, heart, or lungs. In the course of a decade, hundreds of news articles proclaimed acupuncture analgesia as embodying the spirit of Communist politics. While "acupuncture analgesia" was a heterogeneous practice that addressed a variety of disorders, it cohered visually in photographs of patients indifferent to their vivisected bodies, and it cohered discursively as a means for eliminating sensitivity to pain. Across these domains of representation, I argue that reports of obliterating pain with a single needle across clinical encounters collapsed the multiple temporalities of pain. Drawing on sources from an imagined community of researchers and physicians in parts of China, Singapore, Macau, Hong Kong, Britain, and the United States, this chapter explores the epistemic and ontological implications of numbness-a distinct sensation defined by the lack of sensation-in the absence of the brain.

"A kind of agonie in my thoughts": writing puritan and non-conformist women's pain in 17th-century England.

The relationship between pain as a physical and emotional experience and the concept of suffering as an essential aspect of sanctification for faithful believers was a paradoxical and pressing theological and phenomenological issue for puritan and non-conformist communities in 17th-century England. Pain allows the paradox of non-conformists' valorisation and suppression of corporeality to be explored due to its simultaneous impact on the mind and body and its tendency to leak across boundaries separating an individual believer from other members of their family or faith community. The material world and the human body were celebrated as theatres for the display of God's glory through the doctrines of creation and providence despite the fall. Pain as a concept and experience captures this tension as it was represented and communicated in a range of literary genres written by and about puritan and non-conformist women including manuscript letters, spiritual journals, biographies and commonplace books. For such women, targeted by state authorities for transgressing gender norms and the religion established by law, making sense of the pain they experienced was both a personal devotional duty and a political act. Three case studies comprise a microhistory of 17th-century English puritan and non-conformist women's lived experience, interpretation and representation of pain, inscribed in a series of manuscripts designed to nurture the spiritual and political activism of their communities. This microhistory contributes to a better understanding of pain in early modern England through its excavation of the connections that such writers drew between the imperative to be visibly godly, their marginalised subject position as a proscribed religious minority and their interpretation of the pain they experienced as a result.

The dawn of algometry: Paolo Mantegazza's research on pain.

By the 1860s, Paolo Mantegazza was a professor of general pathology at the University of Pavia, where he had graduated in medicine in 1854. There, he founded Italy's first laboratory of experimental pathology and did his first research on pain, the subject of various communications presented to the Istituto Lombardo in Milan. In 1880, Mantegazza published Physiology of Pain, one of the several "physiologies" (of pleasure, of love, of hatred, of woman) that he wrote during his career. In this book, a testament to his scientific versatility, experimental observations supplemented his insights into hygienism and anthropology. This research on pain also led to a dispute between Mantegazza and Cesare Lombroso, which was the start of the two scientists' estrangement.

[Historical pain concepts : Cultural influences on pain perception and interpretation]. / Historische Schmerzkonzepte : Kulturelle Einflüsse auf Schmerzempfindung und -deutung.

In the age of globalization and cultural diversification differing concepts of pain in patient care are of increasing importance. Historical models of the origin and interpretation of pain, which in this article are presented in a cursory and exemplary way, help to understand the panoply of modern concepts outside of medicine. Basically, pain was viewed not only in religion and philosophy but also by premodern physicians as a psychophysical phenomenon crucially depending on the determination by a "soul" therefore creating therapeutic options even before the discovery of an effective analgesia. Furthermore, the historical interpretations of pain in and outside of medicine can still be of profound importance to patients even today.

Emergencies and acute diseases in the collected works of Hippocrates: observation, examination, prognosis, therapy.

The collected works οf Hippocrates include a wealth of references to emergencies and acute conditions; if the physician could treat these, he would be considered superior to his colleagues. Works most relevant to current Emergency Medicine are presented. They indicate Hippocrates' remarkable insight and attention to the value of close observation, meticulous clinical examination, and prognosis. Hippocrates and his followers disdained mystery and were not satisfied until they had discovered a rational cause to diseases. They assigned great significance to distressing signs and symptoms - the famous Hippocratic face, the breathing pattern, pain, seizures, opisthotonus - pointing to a fatal outcome, which they reported to their patient. The principles of treatment of emergencies, such as angina, haemorrhage, empyema, ileus, shoulder dislocations and head injuries, are astonishingly similar to the ones used nowadays.

Killian's photographs: "Facies dolorosa", the countenance of pain.

The book "Facies dolorosa" by Hans Killian, first published in 1934 and later in 1956 and 1967 as extended and annotated versions, comprises ~ 70 photographs depicting facial expressions of patients suffering from various diseases. The photographs in black and white are analyzed and annotated by the author with the purpose of providing clinicians, and especially young doctors, with an insight into the medical and scientific value of facial expression of pain in the diagnosis, staging, and prognosis of severe disease. This historical review of a book no longer in print is part of a 2016 commemorative publication marking the 60th anniversary of the publication of the "Facies dolorosa" by Dustri Medical and Scientific Publications, Munich, Germany and Rockledge, USA.