PAIN

As in previous eras, pain was omnipresent in the new American nation. Americans expected to experience pain and even to be debilitated by it for short or long periods of time, although expressions of this pain varied through gender conventions. By the eighteenth century, women were expected to suffer more than men, as they were considered more delicate creatures. Men who complained too loudly or long about pain ran the risk of being seen as effeminate.

People in pain had recourse to only a few pain medications. By the end of the eighteenth century, large doses of opium were common. Some physicians, called vitalists, believed that the infliction of pain would awaken the patient's vital energy and allow him or her to fight the illness causing the pain. By the early nineteenth century, morphine, a more effective pain reliever, had been isolated from opium. However, all of these attempts to relieve pain did little for most sufferers and ran the risk of creating drug-addicted patients.

For centuries, Christians understood that pain was linked with original sin, an indication of divine retribution. However, with the onset of the Enlightenment, understandings of pain were secularized. Physicians and philosophes separated pain from sin and punishment and searched for scientific understandings of the causes of pain. Some believed pain could give the physician indication of how to proceed in treating the illness.

This secularization did not lead to the abandonment of the link between spirituality and pain in the new American nation. American Christians sustained the belief that God meted out pain. While secular humanists tried to divorce understanding of pain and illness from religion, ministers continued to preach that pain originated from original sin and congregants continued to believe in the link between sin and pain. God made this world a vale of tears. Only in the next life would a man or woman be released from earthly pain.

See alsoDrugs; Medicine .

bibliography

Crane, Elaine Forman. "'I Have Suffer'd Much Today': The Defining Force of Pain in Early America." In Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America. Edited by Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.

Rey, Roselyne. The History of Pain. Translated by Louise Elliot Wallace, J. A. Cadden, and S. W. Cadden. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

Vertosick, Frank T. Why We Hurt: The Natural History of Pain. New York: Harcourt, 2000.

Sarah Swedberg