The Pain Chronicles
Cures, Myths, Mysteries, Prayers, Diaries, Brain Scans, Healing, and the Science of Suffering
A writer living with chronic pain braids her own story with the long, strange history of how people have tried to understand and treat pain.
Melanie Thernstrom, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, has lived with chronic pain for years. In this 2010 book she braids her own story with literary and historical accounts of pain, from ancient remedies and prayers to surgery before anesthesia and the brain scans of modern neuroscience. The result is a history of how people have understood suffering, and an account of how little is still known about pain that will not go away.
Recommended by 1 Person
Meghan O’Rourke
In this hybrid of memoir and research, Thernstrom braids her own story of chronic pain with literary and historical accounts of pain, and incisively lays out how little we understand about chronic pain. I will never forget her riveting accounts of surgery before pain medications and anesthesia.
Article · December 2022
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