Abstract
Rate your pain from 1 to 10. Does it matter that your 6 is not the same as another’s? It does not: this number is your pain. It contains your memories, hopes, fears … the unique, variable experience of your thinking- feeling self. Are you part of an experiment to compare the relief afforded by drug A with drug B? Off your pain will go, carrying in its number the imprint of your memories, hopes, fears ... to join others’ pain as modulated by their unique subjectivities. Collected in sufficient numbers and under the right conditions, the numbers are aggregated as a collective barometer of relief from which differences between your pain and another’s, but not your own judgement and experience, are flattened out. In the early 2000s, pain scales — simple tools using numbers, words or images to quantify experiences of pain — have become commonplace in clinical trials, nurses’ toolkits and specialised health journals, at least in some parts of the world and especially in the USA. Their pervasiveness can be said to authorise pain as an ‘inherently’ subjective experience, permeated by affect and calculable only by the sufferer herself, in processes of allocating and evaluating treatment and care.
Keywords
- Pain Threshold
- Drug Addiction
- Pain Sensitivity
- Psychosomatic Medicine
- Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
B. Noble, D. Clark, M. Meldrum, H. Ten Have, J. Seymour, M. Winslow and S. Paz, ‘The Measurement of Pain, 1945–2000’, Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 29(1) (2005): 14–21.
Lonaine J. Daston and Peter L. Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone Books, 2007).
Gail A. Hornstein, ‘Quantifying Psychological Phenomena: Debates, Dilemmas, and Implications’, in J.G. Morawski (ed.), The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 1–34.
Edwin G. Boring, Sensation and Perception in the History of Psychology (New York: Appleton-Century Company, 1942), 467.
Roselyne Rey The History of Pain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 215–16.
Karl M. Dallenbach, ‘Pain: History and Present Status’, American Journal of Psychology, 52 (1939): 331–47.
Karl Danziger, Constructing the Subject (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 5.
Deborah J. Coon, ‘Standardizing the Subject: Experimental Psychologists, Introspection, and the Quest for a Technoscientific Ideal’, Technology and Culture, 34 (1993): 757–83
Ruth Benschop and Douwe Draaisma, ‘In Pursuit of Precision: The Calibration of Minds and Machines in Late Nineteenth Century Psychology’, Annals of Science, 57 (2000): 1–25.
G. Lombroso-Ferrero (ed.), Criminal Man According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso (M ont clair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1972), 246–9
C. Lombroso, Nouvelles Recherches de Psychiatrie et d’Anthropologie Criminelle (Paris: F. Alcan, 1892), 88.
Arthur MacDonald, Hearing on the Bill (H. R. 14798) to Establish a Laboratory for the Study of the Criminal, Pauper, and Defective Classes, with a Bibliography (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1902)
Arthur MacDonald, A Plan for the Study of Man with Reference to Bills to Establish a Laboratory for the Study of the Criminal, Pauper and Defective Classes (Washington DC: Government Printing Office, 1902).
James B. Gilbert, ‘Anthropometrics in the U.S. Bureau of Education: The Case of Arthur MacDonald’s “Laboratory”’, History of Education Quarterly, 17 (1977): 169–95.
Rob Boddice, ‘The Manly Mind? Revisiting the Victorian “Sex in Brain” Debate’, Gender Sc History, 23 (2011): 321–40
Lucy Bending, The Representation of Bodily Pain in Late Nineteenth-Century English Culture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
Henry K. Beecher, ‘Experimental Pharmacology and Measurement of the Subjective Response’, Science, 116 (1952): 162.
R. Charles Adams, ‘Clinical Research in Anesthesiology’, Anesthesiology, 11 (1950): 178–84
H.M. Marks, ‘Trust and Mistrust in the Marketplace: Statistics and Clinical Research, 1945–1960’, History of Science, 38 (2000): 343–55.
Henry K. Beecher, ‘Limiting Factors in Experimental Pain’, Journal of Chronic Diseases, 4 (1956): 11–21.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2014 Noémi Tousignant
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Tousignant, N. (2014). A Quantity of Suffering: Measuring Pain as Emotion in the Mid-Twentieth-Century USA. In: Boddice, R. (eds) Pain and Emotion in Modern History. Palgrave Studies in the History of Emotions. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372437_7
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137372437_7
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-47613-8
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-37243-7
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)