The Pain Chronicles by Melanie Thernstrom

(Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 364 pages, $27)

We view pain as a symptom, the byproduct of something that can be identified and then cured, said Ryan Brown in Salon.com. That’s the assumption author Melanie Thernstrom started with 12 years ago when a burning sensation arose in her neck one day after a strenuous swim. She initially assumed the pain would go away. Then she assumed a surgeon could eliminate the cause. After nearly two years of living with growing pain, she resisted physical therapy because she still couldn’t accept that there would be no absolute cure. Like 70 million other Americans, Thernstrom had become a sufferer of chronic pain: Her body’s pain signals can’t be shut off because her nervous system itself is malfunctioning.

“You don’t have to be a masochist to derive a great deal of pleasure” from reading this book, said Alec Solomita in The Boston Globe. The Pain Chronicles is not just a personal story. It’s “an ingenious mix of science, history, investigative journalism, and memoir” that explores why pain has always been such a “mercurial” subject. “Religion plays a not very salutary role” in Thernstrom’s historical vignettes. So strongly has pain been associated with divine punishment in the West that even a 19th-century president of the American Dental Association balked at using anesthetics that might “prevent men from going through what God intended them to go through.” Thernstrom’s “astonishing, gruesome” tales of how surgeries were performed before anesthesia will make you thankful that our understanding of pain has grown.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

“The scientific study and treatment of pain” is still in its infancy, said Robin Romm in The New York Times. Many sufferers of chronic pain still struggle even to find doctors who deem their complaints credible. Few have been as fortunate as Thernstrom, who found experts who use neuroimaging to help patients train their brains to “modulate” their perception of pain. Thernstrom hasn’t found a way to defeat pain, but she’s found ways to “at least deal with it,” said Craig Seligman in Bloomberg.com. “That isn’t a storybook ending,” but “this isn’t a storybook.” It “isn’t a tragedy either.”