The Communication of Pain In her book The Body in Pain, Scarry discusses the way that pain “shatters language” and threatens to be “unsharable” (4,5). She describes how pain belongs to an internal geography, when one hears about another person’s physical pain, the events happening within the interior of that person’s body may seem to…
Author: Heather Snay
Heather Snay is a 5th year PhD candidate at the University of Kansas in the department of Geography. She earned her MA from UC Santa Barbara in Global Studies. Currently, her work explores the intersection of geography and medical humanities. She is working on writing her dissertation which aims to explore the complexity of female chronic pain. In this analysis she utilizes the geographic self, a theory that conceptualizes the spatiality of the body, as a lens through which to analyze various humanistic mediums including patient narrative, visual artwork, and graphic novels. Her hope for this work is that it provides new ways of thinking about female chronic pain that can be used to create new ways of teaching about pain and approaching the clinical conversation with such patients. Contact Heather by email, hsnay@ku.edu
The Performance of Pain
You cannot breathe; the world slows down around you; your chest tightens as you walk to your car. Once again, you feel as though you have failed to convince a doctor of your pain, and once again, you must face it alone. This is, unfortunately, the experience of far too many female patients, but the…
Considering the Objectivity of Medical Images
If all we need is to see the body to know it, what do we know? Throughout time, western medicine has sought to see deeper and deeper into the human body. Science has sought to develop technologies that help make the body visible, from X-rays to MRIs and CAT scans to microscopic imaging of bacteria…