Pain: A Political History

✍ Scribed by Wailoo, Keith

• Book ID: 107909977
• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Year: 2014
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 2 MB
• Category: Fiction
• ISBN-13: 9781421413655

✦ Synopsis

In this history of American political culture, Keith Wailoo examines why and how pain and compassionate relief has been a battleground for defining the line between society's liberal trends and conservative tendencies. Tracing the development of pain theories in politics, medicine, law, and society, and battles over the morality and economics of relief, Wailoo points to a tension at the heart of the conservative-liberal divide.

Beginning with the post–World War II rise of a pain relief economy in response to concerns about recovering soldiers, Wailoo explores the 1960s rise of an expansive liberal pain standard, along with the emerging conviction that subjective pain was real, disabling, and compensable. These concepts were attacked during the Reagan era of the 1980s, when a conservative political backlash led to decreasing disability aid and the growing role of the courts as arbiters in the liberal-conservative struggle to define pain.

Wailoo goes on to...