Pain Sensitivity: An Unnatural History from 1800 to 1965

Who was truly capable of experiencing pain? In this article, I explore ideas about the distribution of bodily sensitivity in patients from the early nineteenth century to 1965 in Anglo-American societies. While certain patients were regarded as “truly hurting,” other patients’ distress could be disparaged or not even registered as being “real pain.” Such judgments had major effects on regimes of pain-alleviation. Indeed, it took until the late twentieth century for the routine underestimation of the sufferings of certain groups of people to be deemed scandalous. Often the categorizations were contradictory. For instance, the humble status of workers and immigrants meant that they were said to be insensitive to noxious stimuli; the profound inferiority of these same patients meant that they were especially likely to respond with “exaggerated” sensitivity. How did physicians hold such positions simultaneously? Pain-assignation claimed to be based on natural hierarchical schemas, but the great Chain of Feeling was more fluid than it seemed.