The medical interpretation of pain and the concept of a person

pp. 363-371

in: David C. Thomasma, David N. Weisstub, Christian Hervé, Personhood and health care, Berlin, Springer, 2001

Abstract

We are used to thinking of pain as a physical or psychological affliction that we may experience during the course of a lifetime, yet which can be eliminated with the right treatment. In this sense, pain and suffering have for us an origin in time. Yet historians have never encountered a period of happiness in which illness and human suffering were wholly absent. That pain and suffering arise in some contingent way goes hand in hand with the desire to bring it to an end, to root out its cause and abolish it from our lives. Medicine is par excellence the human craft of ending disease and rooting out suffering.