This new release from Johns Hopkins University Press appears to have some interesting connections to law:
Pain: A Political History, by
Keith Wailoo (Princeton University). From the Press:
Keith Wailoo examines how pain and compassionate relief define a line
between society's liberal trends and conservative tendencies. Tracing
the development of pain theories in politics, medicine, and law, and
legislative and social quarrels over the morality and economics of
relief, Wailoo points to a tension at the heart of the
conservative-liberal divide.
Beginning with the advent of a pain
relief economy after World War II 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 politicized struggle to define pain.
Wailoo
identifies how new fronts in pain politics opened in the 1990s in
states like Oregon and Michigan, where advocates for death with dignity
insisted that end-of-life pain warranted full relief. In the 2006 arrest
of conservative talk show host Rush Limbaugh, Wailoo finds a cautionary
tale about deregulation, which spawned an unmanageable market in pain
relief products as well as gaps between the overmedicated and the
undertreated. Today's debates over who is in pain, who feels another's
pain, and what relief is deserved form new chapters in the ongoing story
of liberal relief and conservative care.
People in chronic pain
have always sought relief—and have always been judged—but who decides
whether someone is truly in pain? The story of pain is more than
political rhetoric; it is a story of ailing bodies, broken lives,
illness, and disability that has vexed government agencies and
politicians from World War II to the present.
More information is available
here.
