Pain, while known to almost everyone, is not universal. The evidence of our own pain, and our own experience, does not provide us with automatic insight into the pains of others, past or present. No matter how self-evident and ubiquitous the sting of a paper cut or the desolation of heartbreak might seem, pain is situated and historically specific. In a work that is sometimes personal, always political, Rob Boddice reveals a history of pain that juggles many disciplinary approaches and disparate languages to tackle the thorniest challenges in pain research. He explores the shifting meaning-making processes that produce painful experiences, expanding the world of pain to take seriously the relationship between pain’s physicality and social and emotional suffering. Ranging from antiquity to the present and taking in pain knowledge and pain experiences from around the world, his tale encompasses not only injury, but also grief, exclusion, chronic pain, and trauma, and reveals how knowledge claims about pain occupy what pain is like. Innovative and compassionate in equal measure, Knowing Pain puts forward an original pain agenda that is essential reading for those interested in the history of emotions, senses, and experience, for medical researchers and practitioners, and for anyone who has known pain.

Have you ever wondered how other women survived their 40's? You'll get an earful in Knowing Pains, an honest, humorous, thoughtful and diverse collection of essays by real women who aren't afraid to tell their age and tell it like it is. Sex, marriage, love, divorce, motherhood, singlehood, passion, obsession. Nothing is off-limits to this startlingly fresh group of new female voices that Molly Rosen has brought together to swap stories and compare notes on the desires, influences and events that have impacted and shaped their midlives. Collectively, they form a true picture of how real women not only survive their 40's, but thrive with dignity, courage and laughter.

Imagine an orchestra in your brain. It plays all kinds of harmonious melodies, then pain comes along and the different sections of the orchestra are reduced to a few pain tunes. All pain is real. And for many people it is a debilitating part of everyday life. It is now known that understanding more about why things hurt can actually help people to overcome their pain. Recent advances in fields such as neurophysiology, brain imaging, immunology, psychology and cellular biology have provided an explanatory platform from which to explore pain. In everyday language accompanied by quirky illustrations, Explain Pain discusses how pain responses are produced by the brain: how responses to injury from the autonomic motor and immune systems in your body contribute to pain, and why pain can persist after tissues have had plenty of time to heal. Explain Pain aims to give clinicians and people in pain the power to challenge pain and to consider new models for viewing what happens during pain. Once they have learnt about the processes involved they can follow a scientific route to recovery. The Authors: Dr Lorimer Moseley is Professor of Clinical Neurosciences and the Inaugural Chair in Physiotherapy at the University of South Australia, Adelaide, where he leads research groups at Body in Mind as well as with Neuroscience Research Australia in Sydney. Dr David Butler is an international freelance educator, author and director of the Neuro Orthopaedic Institute, based in Adelaide, Australia. Both authors continue to publish and present widely.

An exploration of why people all over the world love to engage in pain on purpose--from dominatrices, religious ascetics, and ultramarathoners to ballerinas, icy ocean bathers, and sideshow performers Masochism is sexy, human, reviled, worshipped, and can be delightfully bizarre. Deliberate and consensual pain has been with us for millennia, encompassing everyone from Black Plague flagellants to ballerinas dancing on broken bones to competitive eaters choking down hot peppers while they cry. Masochism is a part of us. It lives inside workaholics, tattoo enthusiasts, and all manner of garden variety pain-seekers. At its core, masochism is about feeling bad, then better—a phenomenon that is long overdue for a heartfelt and hilarious investigation. And Leigh Cowart would know: they are not just a researcher and science writer—they’re an inveterate, high-sensation seeking masochist. And they have a few questions: Why do people engage in masochism? What are the benefits and the costs? And what does masochism have to say about the human experience? By participating in many of these activities themselves, and through conversations with psychologists, fellow scientists, and people who seek pain for pleasure, Cowart unveils how our minds and bodies find meaning and relief in pain—a quirk in our programming that drives discipline and innovation even as it threatens to swallow us whole.

In Knowing the Suffering of Others, legal scholar Austin Sarat brings together essays that address suffering as it relates to the law, highlighting the ways law imagines suffering and how pain and suffering become jurisprudential facts. From fetal imaging to end-of-life decisions, torts to international human rights, domestic violence to torture, and the law of war to victim impact statements, the law is awash in epistemological and ethical problems associated with knowing and imagining suffering. In each of these domains we might ask: How well do legal actors perceive and understand suffering in such varied domains of legal life? What problems of representation and interpretation bedevil efforts to grasp the suffering of others? What historical, political, literary, cultural, and/or theological resources can legal actors and citizens draw on to understand the suffering of others? In Knowing the Suffering of Others, Austin Sarat presents legal scholarship that explores these questions and puts the problem of suffering at the center of thinking about law. The contributors to this volume do not regard pain and suffering as objective facts of a universe remote from law; rather they examine how both are discursively constructed in and by law. They examine how pain and suffering help construct and give meaning to the law as we know it. The authors attend to the various ways suffering appears in law as well as the different forms of suffering that require the law’s attention. Throughout this book law is regarded as a domain in which the meanings of pain and suffering are contested, and constituted, as well as an instrument for inflicting suffering or for providing or refusing its relief. It challenges scholars, lawyers, students, and policymakers to ask how various legal actors and audiences understand the suffering of others. Contributors Montré D. Carodine / Cathy Caruth / Alan L. Durham / Bryan K.Fair / Steven H. Hobbs / Gregory C. Keating / Linda Ross Meyer / Meredith M. Render / Jeannie Suk / John Fabian Witt

This book is all about the inspired work of God and me and my experience in overcoming difficult times. I wrote my book through the leading of the Holy Spirit and through reading and providing the facts from the King James Version of the Holy Bible. I would like others to know that Jesus lives and he is alive and nothing is too hard for the Lord.

​This book provides an account of what is to know what things are, focusing on kinds, both natural (such as water) and social (such as marriage). It brings tools from an area that has received much attention in recent years, the epistemology of inquiry. The knowledge of what things are is to be understood as resulting from successful inquiries directed at questions of the form ‘What is x?’, where x stands for a given kind of thing. The book also addresses knowledge-wh in general (which includes knowledge-who and knowledge-where), as well as the phenomenon of ignorance regarding what things are and our obligations in respect to knowing what things are. It also brings to light new avenues of research for those interested in the relation between the knowledge of what things are and concept possession and amelioration. ‘Knowing What Things Are’ should be of interest to researchers in Epistemology, Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Social Philosophy and Linguistics.

Barry Stroud presents nineteen of his philosophical essays written since 2001, on topics to do with knowing, seeing, and understanding. He discusses the nature of philosophy, sense experience, the possibility of perceptual knowledge, intentional action and self-knowledge, the reality of the colours of things, alien thought and the limits of understanding, moral knowledge, meaning, use, and understanding of language.

With a fresh approach to a common problem, this self-help guide to overcoming back pain advocates adopting the natural, healthy posture of athletes, young children, and people from traditional societies the world over. Arguing that most of what our culture has taught us about posture is misguided—even unhealthy—and exploring the current epidemic of back pain, many of the commonly cited reasons for the degeneration of spinal discs and the stress on muscles that leads to back pain are examined and debunked. The historical and anthropological roots of poor posture in Western cultures are studied as is the absence of back pain complaints in the cultures of Africa, Asia, South America, and rural Europe. Eight detailed chapters provide illustrated step-by-step instructions for making simple, powerful changes to seated, standing, and sleeping positions. No special equipment or exercise is required, and effects are often immediate.