Pain (36 page)

Two major grants played a critical role in supporting the research behind this work and also in supporting a sustained cross-disciplinary community of scholars in which to develop its potential. When the James S. McDonnell Foundation awarded me the Centennial Fellowship in the history of science (a multiyear grant to support a wide range of work on the cultural politics of the biomedical sciences), I envisioned a book on pain as the last in a long line of studies stemming from the generous ten years of support. Having arrived here, I gratefully acknowledge the support of Susan Fitzpatrick, John Breuer, and others at the foundation. Second, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy Research provided another important grant in support of this project, along with regular interaction with a brilliant policy-engaged community of scholars and administrative support that knows no match from Lynn
Rogut and Cynthia Church. For their comments and insights in the RWJ setting, thanks go to Alvin Tarlov, Rosemary Stevens, Paul Cleary, and especially to David Mechanic, whose leadership and breadth of knowledge (as well as his involvement in pain policy) set a very high standard.

For their feedback and encouragement in many other settings, thanks to Julie Livingston, David Mechanic, Peter Guarnaccia, Ann Jurecic, Mark Schlesinger, Gerald Grob, James Livingston, Uri Eisenzweig, Michael McVaugh, Kenneth Ludmerer, Walton Schalick, W. Bruce Fye, Mia Bay, Kevin Kruse, John Burnham, Steve Conn, Katya Guenther, Kevin Kruse, Barbara Grosz, Charles Rosenberg, Joseph Fins, Carla Nappi, Max Weiss, William Jordan, Christina Paxson, Paul Starr, Julian Zelizer, Ben Rich, Elizabeth Armstrong, Emily Thompson, Marni Sandweiss, Bengt Sandin, Claude Steele, Nancy King, Larry Churchill, Barry Saunders, Alexander Rothman, Kendrick Prewitt, Gail Henderson, Sue Estroff, John Kasson, Joy Kasson, Jonathan Oberlander, Don Madison, Allan Horwitz, Joanna Kempner, David Rosner, Jane Ballantyne, Knox Todd, Chris Feudtner, Dan Segal, Susan Schweik, Susan Lindee, Mark Sullivan, Mitchell Max, David Asch, Robert Aronowitz, Jonathan Kahn, Alan Richardson, Jooyoung Lee, Karen Sue Taussig, David Jones, Jonathan Metzl, Robert Brain, Joel Howell, Jennifer Gunn, Susan Jones, Jeffrey Brosco, Ken Goodman, Martin Pernick, Howard Markel, Holly Smith, Peter Guarnaccia, David Barton Smith, Vincent Kopp, Justin Lorts, Louise Russell, Stephen Pemberton, Mark Rodwin, James DuBois, Robert Proctor, Londa Schiebinger, Helena Hansen, Sam Roberts, Jack Lesch, Catherine Lee, Holly Smith, Leslie Gerwin, Kim Scheppele, Lisa Miller, Sean Wilentz, Janet Currie, Anne Case, Angus Deaton, and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson.

For close reading of the manuscript (or portions of it), thanks to Catherine Lee, Elizabeth Chiarello, Dan Rodgers, Hendrik Hartog, Philip Nord, Sarah Milov, Dov Grosghal, Angela Creager, Graham Burnett, Michael Gordin, Erika Milam, Miranda Waggoner, Elizabeth Armstrong, Bridget Gurtler, Nancy Hirschmann, Rogers Smith, Beth Linker, Alison Isenberg, Hannah-Louise Clark, Edna Bonhomme, Shakti Jaising, Anantha Sudhakar, Wangui Muigai, Catherine Abou-Nemeh, and Evan Hepler-Smith. Thanks also to all of the students in the Program in History of Science at Princeton and fellows in the 2006–2007 class at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, whose collective insights on individual chapters helped move the book to a new level.

I owe a special word of gratitude to my wonderful editor at Johns Hopkins University Press, Jacqueline Wehmueller, who saw the value of the project early on, commented on it carefully, and, with characteristic patience, enthusiasm, and insight, helped me to develop it. The work also benefited from the brilliant copyediting and smart commentary of Audra Wolfe and Carrie Watterson.

A number of former students provided research insights, participated in many discussions on the history of pain, helped plan conferences, and gave feedback well beyond what the term “research assistant” conveys. They became key interlocutors over time. Heartfelt thanks to Joseph Gabriel, Rachel McLaughlin, Moshe Usadi, Rachel Watkins, Michelle Rotunda, Stephani Pfeiffer, Curt Cardwell, Dora Vargha, Bridget Gurtler, Justin Lorts, Jane Park, Carolina Giraldo, Dominique Padurano, Richard Mizelle, Greg Swedberg, William Gordon Jr., and Michal Shapiro.

For especially incisive comments and constructive suggestions on the entire manuscript, I want to thank Jonathan Levy, Hannah-Louise Clark, Daniel Rodgers, Hendrik Hartog, Audra Wolfe, Jacqueline Wehmueller, Dov Grosghal, Elizabeth Chiarello, Catherine Lee, Alison Isenberg, and Stephen Pemberton.

My sincere appreciation goes to the archivists who provided important guidance and access to the historical record of pain and politics—at the UCLA Biomedical Library in Los Angeles, particularly Russell Johnson and Teresa Johnson; at the National Archives and Records Administration in College Park, Maryland; at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Library in Abilene, Kansas; at the Ronald Reagan Library in Loma Linda, California; and at the Seeley G. Mudd Library at Princeton University.

Finally, a few words of appreciation to my family who have encouraged, nurtured, and humored my passion for history and writing for many years—to my brother and sister-in-law, Christopher Wailoo and Alisa Lasater, from whom I've learned a thing or two about compassion; to my parents, Bert and Lynette Wailoo, who have always taught me the value of hard work, independence, and looking to the past for inspiration and support; to my historian friend and partner in all things, Alison Isenberg, for dexterous insights too numerous to mention; and to Myla and Elliot Wailoo, and the littlest ones, Anthony and Andrew Wailoo, for giving us all bright reasons to look ahead.

1
. On his way to the Democratic nomination for president in 1992, the Arkansas governor said “I feel your pain” when confronted by a man with AIDS, making the candidate the object of commentary and ridicule. “Heckler Stirs Clinton Anger: Excerpts from the Exchange,” New York Times (March 28, 1992): 9. As one journalist noted years later, when Clinton uttered those words “he may have set himself up for years of razzing and mockery.” Natalie Angier, “Yet Another Sex Difference Found: Gaining Relief from a Painkiller,”
New York Times
, October 30, 1996, C12; for “I'm not here …”, Alison Powell and Leigh Denny, “The Toughest Love,”
Guardian
, May 14, 1999, A13; “best illustration …,” Limbaugh's 1996 television discussion of Clinton can be seen at: Rush Limbaugh, “Bill Clinton Fakes Crying at Ron Brown's Funeral,” YouTube video, posted by blogologist on January 22, 2008,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=lf8TOGrq8Bo
; “just keep in mind …,” David Remnick, “Day of the Dittohead,”
Washington Post
, February 20, 1994, C1.

2
. For “easy to parody …,” see E. J. Dionne Jr., “… Playing Defense,” Washington Post, August 26, 1996, A13; for “the left is so fond …,” see John A. Beard, letter, “Thanks to Liberals, ‘Civil Rights' has lost its meaning,”
Washington Times
, February 11, 1994, A22; for “whiners …,” see Paul Taylor, “Makes Me Wanna Whine,” Washington Post, August 27, 1995, C1.

3
. Ronald Reagan, inauguration address, January 20, 1981, YouTube video, posted by C-SPAN on January 14, 2009,
www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpPt7xG x4Xo
.

4
. The study therefore contributes to the diverse and rich scholarship in disability studies. See for example Paul K. Longmore and Lauri Umansky,
The New Disability History: American Perspectives
(New York: NYU Press, 2001); Rosemarie Garland Thomson,
Extraordinary Bodies
(New York: Columbia University
Press, 1997); and Ruth O'Brien,
Crippled Justice: The History of Modern Disability Policy in the Workplace
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).

5
. In recent years, scholars in political studies have turned increasing attention to the role of emotions—compassion, fear, anger, disgust—in the cultural politics of citizenship and governance. See for example, Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson, eds.,
Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies
(London: Continuum, 2012). See also Sara Ahmed,
The Cultural Politics of Emotion
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), esp. “The Contingency of Pain.” On compassion, see Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion: The Basic Social Emotion,”
Social Philosophy and Policy
13 (1996): 27–58; and Maureen Whitebook, “Compassion as a Political Virtue,”
Political Studies
50 (2002): 529–44. For “it is not dependency …,” see A. Cooper and J. Lousada,
Borderline Welfare: Feeling and Fear of Feeling in Modern Welfare
(London: Karnac, 2005). See also Tim Darington, “The Therapeutic Fantasy: Self-Love and Quick Wins,” in
Politics and the Emotions: The Affective Turn in Contemporary Political Studies
, ed. Paul Hoggett and Simon Thompson (New York: Continuum, 2012).

6
. The literature on liberalism and conservatism in the United States has explored not only the tensions between New Deal liberalism and the rise of neoconservatism but also documented internal tensions in these political commitments—the tensions between, for example, New Deal liberals and southern liberals in the 1940s and 1950s and the internal fracture lines among conservatives on questions of taxes, Communism, race, and so on. Laura Kalman represents another valuable line of analysis—looking closely at the ways liberalism and conservatism coexisted in politics and the ways in which the law became a site for battles over the future of liberal and conservative American society. See Laura Kalman,
Right Star Rising: A New Politics, 1974–1980
(New York: Norton, 2010); and Laura Kalman,
The Strange Career of Legal Liberalism
(New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Other valuable works on liberalism and conservatism, to which this study owes great debt, include the following: Bruce Schulman,
The Seventies: The Great Shift in American Culture, Society, and Politics
(New York: Da Capo, 2001); Gil Troy and Vincent J. Cannato, eds.,
Living in the Eighties
(New York: Oxford, 2009); W. Elliot Brownlee and Hugh Davis Graham, eds.,
The Reagan Presidency: Pragmatic Conservatism and Its Legacies
(Lawrence: Kansas University Press, 2003); Meg Jacobs and Julian Zelizer,
Conservatives in Power: The Reagan Years, 1981–1980; A Brief History with Documents
(New York: Bedford, 2011); Lisa McGirr,
Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New Right
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001); Annelise Orleck,
Storming Caesar's Palace: How Black Mothers Fought Their Own War
on Poverty
(Boston: Beacon Press, 2005); Brian Balogh, “Making Pluralism ‘Great': Beyond a Recycled History of the Great Society,” in
The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism
, ed. Sidney M. Milkis and Jeromse M. Mileur (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).

7
. Transcript of the hearing on Rush Limbaugh's medical records, Palm Beach County, Florida Case No. CA 03 13316, December 23, 2003,
www.freere public.com/focus/f-news/1046161/posts
.

8
. The literature on pain's history (cutting across medicine, social science, humanities, law, and political scholarship) is extensive. See for example Elaine Scarry,
The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); David Morris,
The Culture of Pain
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993); Isabelle Baszanger,
Inventing Pain Medicine: From the Laboratory to the Clinic
(New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Javier Moscoso,
Pain: A Cultural History
(New York: Palgrave, 2012); Esther Cohen,
The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010); and numerous other works. To date, none of this scholarship has examined the politics of pain in the way this book intends—that is, by considering the ways in which seemingly separate cultural, biological, social science, legal, and administrative views on pain have intersected and informed one another. Nor have any of these works sought, as this book does, to show how the topic of pain and proper relief underpins American political debates. One particularly thoughtful analysis is Jean E. Jackson, “Stigma, Liminality, and Chronic Pain: Mind-Body Borderlands,”
American Ethnologist
32 (2005): 332–53. On social suffering, see also Arthur Kleinman, Veena Das, and Margaret Lock, eds.,
Social Suffering
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997) As these authors noted, “Chronic pain syndromes highlight the fault lines in society … [Pain] has an anomalous status in biomedicine … baffling to clinicians and academic physicians.” See also Lous Heshusius,
Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009); Jean E. Jackson,
Camp Pain: Talking with Chronic Pain Patients
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); and Susan Greenhalgh,
Under the Medical Gaze: Facts and Fictions of Chronic Pain
(Berkeley: University of California, 2001).

9
. Sylvia Nasar and Alison Leigh Cowan, “A Wall St. Star's Agonizing Confession,”
New York Times
, April 3, 1994, 66.

10
. Shizuko Y. Fagerhaugh and Anselm Strauss,
Politics of Pain Management: Staff-Patient Interaction
(Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1977), iv.

11
. Martha Nussbaum, “Compassion: The Basic Human Emotion,”
Social Philosophy
and Policy 13 (December 1996): 28.

12
. Edmund Burke, “On the Sublime and Beautiful,” in
On Taste, On the Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, and A Letter to a Noble Lord
(New York: Cosimo, 2009), 114.

13
. John Stuart Mill,
Utilitarianism
, 2nd ed. (London: Longman, Green, Longman, Roberts, and Green, 1864), 17.