Brain Advance Access published online on February 22, 2007
Brain, doi:10.1093/brain/awl369
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© The Author (2007). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Guarantors of Brain. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Book Review |
Pain past, present and future: the unhappy paradox of scientific advances and therapeutic standstill
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
Apart from those rare individuals with an inability to feel pain, and those who are indifferent to it—and they suffer in different ways—all of us will experience pain. How fortunate, then, we are to be living now: it is almost beyond one's comprehension to envisage what tortures were experienced by those at the sharp end of the sword or the surgeon's knife, or during childbirth, when there was so little to offer in the way of pain relief. At the end of life, too, what suffering was endured—and all too often still is—by those in the terminal and often painful stages of their existence, before the need for alleviating pain became accepted as something of unsurpassed importance.
The story of ‘The fight against pain’, the subtitle of Dormandy's book, is the story, or more accurately the very many stories, of attempts to grapple with pain and its prevention, abolition and
The National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery, London, UK