A Song Of Suffering

The last contraction never comes. Melanie cannot feel Ezra. Her body thinks that he is already out. She can hear "Melanie, push this baby out." But she can't feel anything to push. She can hear the call to 911, hear them ask for the address. --- Beliefs don't make a story. It's what happens when they meet an experience that flies in their face and seemingly discredits them, a juxtaposition that pits the intellectual content of belief, so hidden and implausible, squarely against the emotional and psychological experience of suffering, so obvious and real. It's one thing to profess faith in a loving, merciful God who looks out for your best interests and works out all things for good. It's another to believe that in the face of your infant turning blue and screaming from suffocating to death, night after night, after night... to attempt to reconcile your feelings of complete abandonment to a purportedly loving God's promises of comfort, peace and even joy.

The last contraction never comes. Melanie cannot feel Ezra. Her body thinks that he is already out. She can hear "Melanie, push this baby out." But she can't feel anything to push. She can hear the call to 911, hear them ask for the address. --- Beliefs don't make a story. It's what happens when they meet an experience that flies in their face and seemingly discredits them, a juxtaposition that pits the intellectual content of belief, so hidden and implausible, squarely against the emotional and psychological experience of suffering, so obvious and real. It's one thing to profess faith in a loving, merciful God who looks out for your best interests and works out all things for good. It's another to believe that in the face of your infant turning blue and screaming from suffocating to death, night after night, after night... to attempt to reconcile your feelings of complete abandonment to a purportedly loving God's promises of comfort, peace and even joy.

In The Song of Our Scars, physician Haider Warraich offers a bold re-examination of the nature of pain not as a simple physical sensation, but as a social and cultural experience. Warraich, who himself has lived with chronic pain, considers the ways in which our notions of pain have been shaped, not just by science but by politics and power, race and gender, by whose suffering has mattered and whose hasn't. He weaves a provocative history that carries us from medieval prohibitions on pain relief during childbirth to racist theories of pain tolerance to the opiate epidemics of both the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. He reveals that pain often carried a spiritual dimension, erased by modern biomedicine. Today, he writes, patients with chronic pain not only suffer with no end in sight, but are stigmatized and delegitimized by the health system. The conclusion is clear: Only by reckoning with pain's complicated history alongside its intricate biology can we truly begin to alleviate suffering. The Song of Our Scars is an indictment of a broken system and a plea for a more holistic understanding of the human body.