The Language of Pain

An extraordinarily perceptive and interesting book. The author is a practising physician who also holds a doctorate in literature from Oxford. He is therefore able to write broadly, also drawing on his own experience of pain with a bone marrow transplant. Previously, he had really only experienced pain from the outside when treating patients. The core difficulty is that pain is hard to express - the painter Edward Munch depicted it in his painting The Scream. The medical response has been to construct instruments such as the pain scale. Biro goes a lot further than this by introducing metaphor from many literary sources including Emily Dickinson, Jack London and Tolstoy; curiously, he quotes from a number of Tolstoy's short stories without mentioning The Death of Ivan Ilyich with its progressive narrative of pain. The inability to communicate tends to isolate the individual into what he calls the solitude of personal experience. The use of metaphor is a resource for the imagination that 'extends the boundaries of our shared world.' Anyone seeking to understand and respond to pain will find this book an essential guide.