Of all the symptoms with which illness acquaints us, pain is famously the most difficult to quantify. Both a somatic and psychic experience, pain is a chameleon and stubbornly private. As Virginia Woolf observes in her essay On Being Ill, how can prose capture the nature of “this monster, this body, this miracle, its pain without slipping into mysticism”?
If pain is challenging for a writer, it is even more so for a doctor. Is a patient who is presenting with pain in as much discomfort and distress as they say they are? And, if so, how to treat them? And what if they are a malingerer or a hysteric and by alleviating their symptoms you reinforce their psychopathology?
