Tag: Pain
-
Ahab’s gift: Herman Melville’s Moby Dick and the meaning of pain
Xi ChenRochester, New York, United States In the summer months before my first year of medical school, I unfurled the pages of Moby Dick. Immersed in the novel’s adventurous spirit and Shakespearean prose, I followed the narrator from the piers of Nantucket into the Atlantic and waded through Captain Ahab’s quest for the legendary white…
-
A lesson in physiology
Anthony Papagiannis Thessaloniki, Greece Waterfront Promenade, Thessaloniki, Greece. Photograph by the author. The contours are quite familiar, both to the eye and the touch. My hand strokes its counterpart, its twin sibling: they have been working together ever since I first saw the light of the day in this world. They have washed, clasped,…
-
James Simpson, who made childbirth painless
A large jolly man with broad shoulders, large hands, blue eyes, and a charismatic personality, James Young Simpson was said to have been the most popular man in Edinburgh since the death of Sir Walter Scott.1 Born in 1811 at Bathgate, he was the seventh son of a village baker in a poor family housed in…
-
A form of pain
Ifediba Nzube Port Harcourt, Nigeria Èsù the trickster by Onyeji Prince. For Yewande, pain is Èsù slapping her head like a bata drum. But no one sees that; they see only a tumor pushing out her left eye, up her palate, and through her nostrils. Most days she smells like meat gone green. The…
-
Pushing back into chaos
Kyra McComas Salt Lake City, Utah, United States The pathway of pain according to René Descartes: “Particles of heat” (A) close to the foot (B) contact the skin and pull threads (C) up the body, that “open the pores” (D, E) and allows “animal spirits to flow from a cavity (F) into the muscles,”…
-
Pain and palpation: reading the body narrative with the osteopathic medical touch
Aneesa Sataur Miami, Florida, United States “An unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.” (Definition of Pain, The International Association for the Study of Pain, 2010)1 Andrew Taylor Still, 1914 Pain is a complex sensation that incorporates the mental and the physical.…