Pain and the politics of sympathy, historical reflections, 1760s to 1960s

Abstract

In her inaugural lecture, Prof. Bourke will explore the language of pain in Anglo-American societies from the 1760s. Although the communication of pain presents difficulties, she will be arguing that painful worlds are expressed through a rich language of metaphor, simile, metonym, and analogy. Furthermore, these metaphors are based on embodied experiences, dissolving any body/mind distinction. The mind is embodied in the sense that people think via sensorimotor experiences, and the body is "mind-ful". Although there are many consistent metaphors used by people in the past to communicate their suffering, we can also identify shifts in metaphoric use. These shifts tell us a great deal of changes in the meaning and sensation of pain. Finally, Prof. Bourke will conclude by suggesting various reasons why clinical languages of pain might have become "thinner" since the eighteenth century.