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The Song of Our Scars : The Untold Story of Pain

By Haider Warraich

 599.00 inclusive of all taxes

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About the book

In The Song of Our Scars, physician Haider Warraich offers a bold re-examination of the nature of pain not as a simple physical sensation, but as a social and cultural experience. Warraich, who himself has lived with chronic pain, considers the ways in which our notions of pain have been shaped, not just by science but by politics and power, race and gender, by whose suffering has mattered and whose hasn’t. He weaves a provocative history that carries us from medieval prohibitions on pain relief during childbirth to racist theories of pain tolerance to the opiate epidemics of both the nineteenth and the twenty-first centuries. He reveals that pain often carried a spiritual dimension, erased by modern biomedicine. Today, he writes, patients with chronic pain not only suffer with no end in sight, but are stigmatized and delegitimized by the health system. The conclusion is clear: Only by reckoning with pain’s complicated history alongside its intricate biology can we truly begin to alleviate suffering.

The Song of Our Scars is an indictment of a broken system and a plea for a more holistic understanding of the human body.

Pages: 288

Available in: Paperback

Language: English

Haider Warraich

Haider Warraich is a physician at Brigham Women’s Hospital, an assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, and is serving as the senior advisor for Chronic Disease to the Commissioner of the US Food and Drug Administration. He is the author of Modern Death and State of the Heart and regularly writes for The New York Times and The Washington Post, among others. He lives in Wellesley, Massachusetts.

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Books by Haider Warraich

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