Pain and its Meanings
On 7-8 December 2012, we hosted with Wellcome Collection a two-day symposium to probe and discuss profound questions around how and why we give meaning to bodily pain.
Leading thinkers participated, including: Gillian Bendelow, Joanna Bourke, Javier Moscoso, Tom Shakespeare, Marina Warner and Joanna Zakrzewska.
Deborah Padfield screened her film duet for one. Two new commissions were presented: a poem by Jo Shapcott, titled 'P'; and a new two-part drama set to music by Daniel Eisner Harle titled As Above, So Below.
To hear Joanna Bourke talking about the project and the event, click here.
Watch
Highlights of the event on film. Click image
Read
The booklet which includes an introduction by Joanna Bourke, an interview with Deborah Padfield, Jo Shapcott's poem, and the libretto from As Above, So Below.
Pain and its Meanings: Click booklet to download
The 'Perspectives on Pain' issue of 19. Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century includes eight new, open-access, peer reviewed essays on pain.
'Perspectives on Pain' issue: Click image
Listen
As Above, So Below - a short drama to music in two parts. Music by Daniel Eisner Harle, words by Spencer Noble. Cast: Mr Clarke - Nick Allen, Miss Sinclair - Rosie Lomas. Band: Hurdy gurdy - Steven Tyler, flugal horn/trumpet - Darren Moore, flutes - Rosanna Terberg.
Miss Sinclair goes to Mr Clarke for advice on her illness. Mr Clarke initially dazzles her with his seemingly limitless knowledge but after five weeks of following his orders to no avail, Miss Sinclair’s confidence in Mr Clarke is tested.
To read the full libretto, download the booklet Pain and its Meanings.
Jo Shapcott - Poem titled 'P'
Gillian Bendelow - Chronic Pain and the Mind-Body Problem in Health and Illness
Tom Shakespeare - Disability and its Discontents
Marina Warner - 'Blood in the Shoe': Cruelty, Pleasure and the Happy Ending
Joanna Zakrzewska - Pain: Friend or Foe?
Joanna Bourke - Being in Pain: Historical Reflections
Past events
Pain as Emotion; Emotion as Pain: Perspectives from Modern History
26 October 2012
Organised by Rob Boddice, Ph.D (Languages of Emotion Cluster, Freie Universität, Berlin)
Download the conference programme here
Pain and Old Age: Three Centuries of Suffering in Silence?
27 October 2012
Organised by Lynn Botelho, PhD (Department of History, Indiana University of Pennsylvania)
Download the conference programme here
History of Pain without Lesion in the Mid to Late Nineteenth Century West
19 May 2012
This workshop generated lively discussion around the social, cultural and medical influences of what we might now refer to as chronic pain.
Main speakers: Dr Daniel S Goldberg (Visiting Fellow to the BPP) and Dr Andrew Hodgkiss (Consultant Liaison Psychiatrist)
Rhetorics of Pain: Historical Reflections
21st May 2011
This conference explored the complex phenomenon of pain from the eighteenth century to the 1960s.
Professor Joanna Bourke (Chair, Birkbeck College)
Rhetorics of Pain: Historical Reflections
Dr Lucy Bending (University of Reading)
Translating Pain: Overcoming the Ineffability of Pain
Dr Anna Carden-Coyne (University of Manchester)
Cultures of Pain: The Political, Social and Sexual Provocations of War Wounds
Dr Jeremy Davies (University of Cambridge)
The Distinction between Mental and Physical Pain
Professor Sander Gilman (Emory University)
Seeing Pain
Professor Javier Moscoso (Spanish National Research Council)
The Topics of Pain and the Anthropology of Experience
A remedy for headaches. Process print, c. 1850.
