Ebook The story of pain: Part 2
➤ Gửi thông báo lỗi ⚠️ Báo cáo tài liệu vi phạmNội dung chi tiết: Ebook The story of pain: Part 2
Ebook The story of pain: Part 2
6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2ymptoms.(Peter Mere Latham, 1X37)1Words are never enough. Pain is communicated through gestures, inarticulate utterances, facial expressions, posture, and other non-linguistic movements of the body. A piece of doggerel, published in rhe IjOiidon Hospital (id'.erte in 1900, satirized this aspect of p Ebook The story of pain: Part 2ain in the context of a person having a tooth extracted. Once seated in the dentists chair, the patient regresses. I lesquirms, an’ squeals, an' screeEbook The story of pain: Part 2
ches, sometimes I gives a shout.I weeps, an' wails, an' wriggles, and wags my tongue about.I shrieks, an’kicks, an'scratches, and then I tries to bite6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2 unconscious realm, rooted ill physiological impulses or assimilated involuntarily during processes of socialization. Irrespective of origin, a world of meaning is conveyed in the whimper, the wince, the sweat on the upper lip, the tremor, the shuffle, the shielding motion, the closed fist resting o Ebook The story of pain: Part 2n the bed linen, the compulsive rubbing, and the shrill cry ‘Ouch!’ In the words of an unnamed mother writing 111 1819,‘bodily torture' was‘too palpabEbook The story of pain: Part 2
ly indicated by the starting dew, the cold brow, the blanched lip. and bloodless cheek'? Functional behaviours—such as excessive sleeping or assuming 6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2sedIÓ0GESTURE(the stoical pursing of the lips or the stiffened gait, for instance). For convenience. I will be referring to these physiological responses (sweating, pallor, or muscular tension), facial expressions (grimacing), anti paralinguis-tic vocalizations (groaning or screaming) as‘gestural la Ebook The story of pain: Part 2nguages’. Il is important. however, to acknowledge the intentional or self-reflective nature of some of these languages and not others.Gestural languaEbook The story of pain: Part 2
ges are invaluable to the assessment of pain. Witnesses to pain “depend upon the sufferer of pain for all information about its amount and its quality6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2ders, the “gestures and postures which a sufferer exhibits; the cries, the pathos, the very tone of the voice; the expression and the changes of countenance’ are all clues to the persons sufferings.4 Indeed, disembodied, abstract speech sounds are a small component of face-to-face communication. For Ebook The story of pain: Part 2mal linguistic mechanisms, such as vocabulary, syntax, tense, intonation, and so on, routinely fail to convey even a minuscule part of the person-in-pEbook The story of pain: Part 2
ain’s lived experience. The body itself is a semiotic instrument. Agony is ‘stamped on every feature’; it ‘speaks in every line of the countenance’, a6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2poet William Cowper pul it, “I am ... persuaded that faces are as legible as books’, with the advantage that “they are read in much less lime, and are much less likely to deceive’.6 Academic analyses too are partial to the textual metaphor, earnestly presenting the body as a ‘semiotic instalment’, c Ebook The story of pain: Part 2laiming that pain is ‘written on the countenance’, and even proposing (as I do here) that bodily movements are ■gestural languages’. However, it is imEbook The story of pain: Part 2
portant not to get (metaphorically) carried away. Crucially, gestural signs of pain can constitute a separate, and sometimes even autonomous, componen6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2natives to speech; they may even ‘constitute a distinct domain of communicative action’." Gestures and bodily expressions do not simply contribute to those linguistic meanings given to pain, bur may independently constitute meaning as well.Surprisingly, then, gestures have only recently attracted th Ebook The story of pain: Part 2e attention of historians.8 In part, this is due to the assumed transient qualities of face, hand, and body movements. 1 listorians have tended to favEbook The story of pain: Part 2
our approaches that analyse tangible objects embedded in archaeological sites, archives, andGESTURElóila culture maiérielle. As philosopher Francis Ba6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2ity with the thing signified*.9 This was perhaps what cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu had in mind when he observed that it was precisely ‘because agents never know completely what they are doing' that ‘what they (Io has more sense than they know’.10 Il was an insight that Freud used to startling e Ebook The story of pain: Part 2ffect. As we will see, despite the almost feverish insistence that the body-in-pain speaks a ‘natural’ language, it turns out that it moves in highlyEbook The story of pain: Part 2
staged, historically contingent,and contextually intricate ways.JJGestures of Suffering in the ClinicThe unmistakable gestural aspects of pain were pa6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2anchester Infirmary in the middle of the nineteenth century. He wrote eloquently of the ‘world of woe compressed within the walls of that hospital!’ Here’, he remarked, was ‘a convulsive sob; there a deep groan; yonder a piercing shriek. What dreary, lonely nights, and how deep and solemn the midnig Ebook The story of pain: Part 2ht tongue of rime, as heard by rhe agonised, wakeful patients!’ 1 From the perspective of his hospital bed. communication was entirely gestural.’IowneEbook The story of pain: Part 2
nd conceived of pain as a convulsion, deeply embedded within damaged flesh. Pain swallowed up entire worlds, compressed them into claustrophobic space6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2victims remain wakeful throughout their ordained hours of torment.Similar metaphors were used three-quarters of a century later, albeit in the context of a wartime Field I lospital rather than a pauper one. Like Townend, Robert Wistrand emphasized the gestural performances of people-in-pain. Ill his Ebook The story of pain: Part 2 poem ’Field Hospital’ (1944), words had been banished, forcing wounded men to make ‘language out of sobs', as‘evocative as song'. For Wistrand,Here wEbook The story of pain: Part 2
ords are out of bounds. The pulse of silence throbs. Reason, licking wounds. Makes language out of sobs.I 62GESTUREEvocative as songThe literate groa6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2e By voices underground.’2Wistrand’s Field 1 lospital was a place where reason had been banished. Language was incapable of conveying the horror of combat and wounding: words were nothing more than blood-specked foam. Terrifying thoughts of what they had gone through only exacerbated rhe men's suffe Ebook The story of pain: Part 2ring; their memories kept pain alive by continuing to clumsily prod their wounds, rhe only ’literate’ language that remained was that of groans.TownenEbook The story of pain: Part 2
d’s and Wistrand’s evocations of the writhing body-in-pain, stripped of articulate language, were unremittingly negative. Both were writing as wounded6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2other caregivers could go to the opposite extreme: for them, gestural languages might be important in al least three ways: physiologically, they were sometimes beneficial (even for the person-in-pain); they might elicit sympathy from witnesses; and they might provide valuable diagnostic clues. In al Ebook The story of pain: Part 2l three cases, we shall see. there were important shifts over the centuries.rhe first function of gestural expressiveness was that it could help the hEbook The story of pain: Part 2
ealing process. I hroughout the period explored in this book, both anecdotal and experimental evidence suggested that gestures (such as stroking the a6GestureSome acute observers have drawn such secrets from the expression of the countenance, that it has been to them the place almost of all other sy Ebook The story of pain: Part 2ing humoral, nervous, biomedical, holistic, and neurological ones) insisted upon this positive function of gestures.rhe point here, though, is a different one: prior to the biochemical revolution of the twentieth century, with its obsessive interest in the total eradication of the‘evil’that w as pai Ebook The story of pain: Part 2n, commentators routinely insisted that the expressive face, contorted body, and inarticulate groans of a person-in-pain might often be physiologicallEbook The story of pain: Part 2
y necessary if a suffering person was to find respite. This was the point of an article entitled‘Crying. Weeping, and Sighing’(1852), in which the autGọi ngay
Chat zalo
Facebook