Oh, My Aching Back

Roy Porter

  • The History of Pain by Roselyne Rey, translated by Elliott Wallace and J.A. Cadden, and S.W. Cadden
    Harvard, 394 pp, £25.50, October 1995, ISBN 0 674 39967 6

From the Church Fathers, through St Ignatius Loyola and Pascal to the Marquis de Sade, the problem of pain was agonisingly debated, not least because mortification was holiness and judicial torture the authorised engine of truth. But nowadays, pain, in either its medical or its metaphysical aspects, is oddly little discussed given the ubiquitous misery it causes.

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