This issue of 19, guest edited by Louise Hide, Joanna Bourke, and Carmen Mangion, examines the meaning of pain - for sufferers, physicians, and other witnesses - in the nineteenth century. Articles by social and cultural historians, and by literary scholars, discuss the implications of shifting discourses in personal narratives, in religious communities, and in philosophical, medical, and psychiatric texts. Analysing language in the diverse theories of the period, this issue extends and deepens our understanding of the complex interaction between the body, mind, and culture in order to gain insight into the ever-changing subjective experience of pain.
The Birkbeck Pain Project examines narratives of bodily pain produced from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, the three-year project, led by Professor Joanna Bourke, is based at the Department of History, Classics, and Archaeology.
Email: painproject@bbk.ac.uk
Web: www.bbk.ac.uk/history/our-research/birkbeckpainproject
Table of Contents
Articles
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Perspectives on Pain: Introduction | Abstract PDF HTML |
| Louise Hide, Joanna Bourke, Carmen Mangion |
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The Sensible and Insensible Body: A Visual Essay | Abstract PDF HTML |
| Joanna Bourke |
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The Fire-Raisers: Bentham and Torture | Abstract PDF HTML |
| Jeremy Davies |
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‘Why, would you have me live upon a gridiron?’: Pain, Identity, and Emotional Communities in Nineteenth-Century English Convent Culture | Abstract PDF HTML |
| Carmen M. Mangion |
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Pain Without Lesion: Debate Among American Neurologists, 1850–1900 | Abstract PDF HTML |
| Daniel Goldberg |
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Species of Compassion: Aesthetics, Anaesthetics, and Pain in the Physiological Laboratory | Abstract PDF HTML |
| Rob Boddice |
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The Patient’s Pain in Her Own Words: Margaret Mathewson’s ‘Sketch of Eight Months a Patient, in the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh, A.D. 1877’ | Abstract PDF HTML |
| Mary Wilson Carpenter |
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Anaesthetic Bodies and the Absence of Feeling: Pain and Self-Mutilation in Later Nineteenth-Century Psychiatry | Abstract PDF HTML |
| Sarah Chaney |
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Making Sense of Pain: Delusions, Syphilis, and Somatic Pain in London County Council Asylums, c. 1900 | Abstract PDF HTML |
| Louise Hide |
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