Country remedies: traditional East Anglian plant remedies in the twentieth century

paintings, complemented by quotations of the artist, are a highlight of the book. Patrick Lacoste's discussion of psychoanalytic approaches to pain is dense and difficult. He discusses three separate phenomena-psychogenic bodily pain, neurotic psychical pain and psychotic suffering. He depicts psychogenic pain as a defence, an avoidance of an encounter with something even more unbearable. His tantalizing definition of psychical pain as "half-way between anguish and mourning" (p. 160) is expanded in terms of the Freudian "lost object" and the Lacanian distinction between "lack" as motor of desire (in neurosis) and as a void (a hole in the Real to be "patched" by hallucination or delusion) in psychosis. Readers of Medical History may be most interested by the two historical chaptersGeorges Duby on physical pain in the Middle Ages and Roy Porter's overview of pain in the history of the western world. Duby argues that the almost total absence of pain in documents from 1000 to 1200 reflects a male-dominated, militaristic ideology that saw pain as feminine and weak. While women endured labour pain, men had to work. Pain was a sign of original sin, of God's punishment. By the thirteenth century there was increasing interest in empathizing with the bodily suffering of Christ's crucifixion, and hospitals and charitable institutions began to appear. Porter explores the history of pain thematically. Beginning with a section on execution and torture by political and religious authorities he moves to a discussion on pain language and silence. Sufferers must tread a fine line between the silence of the traumatised, with a risk of going unnoticed, and the verbiage that attracts a diagnosis of hypochondria. The impact of Utilitarianism, Darwinism and Anti-vivisectionism on nineteenth-century attitudes to pain is briefly reviewed. The piece closes with the question of whether pain has changed over the centuries. Porter quite rightly dispatches this as an unanswerable matter.