Pain

In short, Wailoo argues, pain is an effective political issue. It just depends on whose pain you're talking about.

An interesting and engaging read... It is refreshing to read about the need to find a middle ground when discussing pain in relation to the political forum... This book would be of insight to anyone with an interest in the historical management of pain.

In Pain: A Political History, Keith Wailoo illuminates the social, political, and ideological lines along which our understanding of pain and our approach to treating (and paying for) it have been drawn.

Pain: A Political History is a useful introduction to a study of the role of pain in postwar American legislation on disability, physician-assisted suicide and fetal pain.

Wailoo bring[s] the creative and unexpected tools that have enlivened scholarship on the senses.

Here's a must-read book for scholars and students of American history as well as history of medicine.

Wailoo bring[s] the creative and unexpected tools that have enlivened scholarship on the senses.

Physicians and social scientists are aware that individual pain is complex and elusive—an aggregate of physiology, cultural context, and idiosyncrasy. Wailoo has added a significant analytic dimension to this understanding of pain by incorporating the domains of ideology and politics as they are reflected in policy. A highly original and persuasively argued contribution by one of America's most prominent historians of medicine and society, Pain will attract a wide and thoughtful readership.

Wailoo's ambitious volume tells post–World War Two American political history through the story of pain: its cultural meanings, economic costs, and bureaucratic management and its political uses and abuses. No other work I know of sustains such a macro-analysis while attending to pain's medical, moral, and media significances. And reading it hurts not—and for policy makers might even be therapeutic! Bravo!

At once capacious and focused, Pain expands on the cultural histories of this compelling topic by admirably developing the political construction of the elusive and yet ever-so-material experience of pain. The politics of pain, disability, medicine, and suicide emerge as Wailoo’s book ranges across the rhetoric of a 'bleeding heart' liberal to the conservative uses of rugged individualism in relation to the pharmaceutical industry.

Beautifully written, broad ranging, deep, wise, unexpected, and endlessly fascinating.