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This valuable and insightful study into chronic pain and its treatment advances a striking analysis of the complex phenomenon of chronic pain, also attesting to the importance of the medical humanities in addressing urgent questions that medical science alone cannot resolve. The primary purpose of this book is twofold. First, to demonstrate empirically - against a conceptual background drawn from multiple disciplines and knowledge bases (historical, medical, neurobiological, psychological, socio/anthropological) - how an apparently ''soft'' intervention such as literary reading can effectively combat symptoms of a condition as intractable as chronic pain. Second, to explore what this evidence tells us about pain (as a lived experience as well as a condition in urgent need of new treatment options) and about literature and the reading of fiction and poetry as therapeutic influences in contemporary health and healthcare, most particularly in alleviating the (often severe) mental health difficulties with which chronic pain is almost universally associated. Based on unique empirical research with people who are living with chronic pain, this book is the first of its kind to demonstrate the value of literature and literary reading both as a discourse for understanding and ''finding'' pain and as an intervention in its treatment.>
List of contents
PrefacePart One Chronic Pain Where is it? What is it?:
Pain as Symptom, Experience, and Idea (past and present)
1. Chronic Pain: The Clinical Picture
2. Pain and Meaning
3. Pain: Body and Mind
4. Pain and Language
Part Two 'In Reading': Chronic Pain, Literature, Therapy
5. Why Reading?: Starting-points and Key Concepts
6. Memory, Time and Loss: Encountering the Past
7. Changing the Story
8. Finding a Language
9. Shared Reading and Intersubjectivity: The Group
Part Three Reading not Talking: Pain, Trauma, Treatment
10. Pain and Stuckness
Afterword
Select Bibliography
Index
About the author
Josie Billington is Professor in English Literature at the University of Liverpool, UK. She has edited and published extensively on Victorian women's fiction and poetry including 21st Century Oxford Authors: Elizabeth Barrett Browning, George Eliot's
Scenes of Clerical Life, Elizabeth Gaskell's
Wives and Daughters, and Margaret Oliphant's
The Ladies Lindores. She has also led multiple inter-disciplinary studies on the value of literary reading for health. Her publications in this field include
Is Literature Healthy? (Oxford University Press, 2016) and
Reading and Mental Health (Palgrave, 2019).
Summary
This valuable and insightful study into chronic pain and its treatment advances a striking analysis of the complex phenomenon of chronic pain, also attesting to the importance of the medical humanities in addressing urgent questions that medical science alone cannot resolve.
The primary purpose of this book is twofold. First, to demonstrate empirically – against a conceptual background drawn from multiple disciplines and knowledge bases (historical, medical, neurobiological, psychological, socio/anthropological) – how an apparently ‘soft’ intervention such as literary reading can effectively combat symptoms of a condition as intractable as chronic pain. Second, to explore what this evidence tells us about pain (as a lived experience as well as a condition in urgent need of new treatment options) and about literature and the reading of fiction and poetry as therapeutic influences in contemporary health and healthcare, most particularly in alleviating the (often severe) mental health difficulties with which chronic pain is almost universally associated.
Based on unique empirical research with people who are living with chronic pain, this book is the first of its kind to demonstrate the value of literature and literary reading both as a discourse for understanding and 'finding' pain and as an intervention in its treatment.
