The journey of life: a cultural history of aging in America

Adducing historical, philosophical and biomedical evidence, Morris invites us to conclude that this time-honoured physical/psychological division of pain possesses little intrinsic validity. It is the legacy of an exploded metaphysics, which shores up a difficult-to-defend division within medicine (between somatists and psychiatrists). It conveniently shelves, for the medical profession, the more intractable problems of chronic pain that cannot be attached to identifiable lesions, rather as has been suggested by A. D. Hodgkiss in his 'Chronic pain in nineteenth-century British medical writings', History of Psychiatry, 1991, ii: 27-40. Morris has constructed his book as a sequence of thematic essays, designed to challenge these dubious dichotomies and bring evidence to bear from a range of sources-patient experience, the world's religions, great fiction (e.g. Tolstoy's Ivan Ilych), aesthetics, sexology, and so forth-to enrich our understanding of the phenomenon. Arguing thematically that pain is to be taken not as sensation but as experience (that is, sensation filtered through culture), Morris demonstrates convincingly the extraordinary relativity of pain encounters, concluding that coping with pain depends heavily upon appropriate kinds of cultural training. Our society is one, he argues, which has abandoned all serious education in the endurance of pain, not least because it is no longer perceived as having any positive value or meaning. Analysing the cultures of Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Christianity, Morris explains the meanings attributed to pain in earlier value-systems (punishment, trial, scourge, blessing, warning), which once understood were expected to make it more bearable. A certain amount of the ground traversed in this book is familiar; I would have preferred a more sustained analysis of transformations in medical thinking (e.g., before and after anaesthesia) rather than the somewhat marginally relevant discussions of pain and the aesthetics of the sublime, or the mandatory account of de Sade, or speculations on Lyotardian post-modernist readings of pain. Nevertheless, The culture of pain constitutes a lucid and illuminating historical and literary introduction to a vexed topic. This cultural history of the "historical meanings of aging" traces the process and experience of growing old in western culture from its ancient roots, through medieval and early modern Europe, its transmission with English Puritans to the New World and its subsequent fate, to the present, in the United States. Its sources are the work of historians and other commentators on old age, medical, philosophical and religious writings, literary and visual representations, all selected according to principles which are not …