Few have been as fortunate as Thernstrom, who found experts who use neuroimaging to help patients train their brains to “modulate” their perception of pain. Many sufferers of chronic pain still struggle even to find doctors who deem their complaints credible. “The scientific study and treatment of pain” is still in its infancy, said Robin Romm in The New York Times. So strongly has pain been associated with divine punishment in the West that even a 19th-century president of the American Dental Association balked at using anesthetics that might “prevent men from going through what God intended them to go through.” Thernstrom’s “astonishing, gruesome” tales of how surgeries were performed before anesthesia will make you thankful that our understanding of pain has grown. “Religion plays a not very salutary role” in Thernstrom’s historical vignettes. It’s “an ingenious mix of science, history, investigative journalism, and memoir” that explores why pain has always been such a “mercurial” subject. The Pain Chronicles is not just a personal story. “You don’t have to be a masochist to derive a great deal of pleasure” from reading this book, said Alec Solomita in The Boston Globe. Like 70 million other Americans, Thernstrom had become a sufferer of chronic pain: Her body’s pain signals can’t be shut off because her nervous system itself is malfunctioning. After nearly two years of living with growing pain, she resisted physical therapy because she still couldn’t accept that there would be no absolute cure. Then she assumed a surgeon could eliminate the cause. She initially assumed the pain would go away. That’s the assumption author Melanie Thernstrom started with 12 years ago when a burning sensation arose in her neck one day after a strenuous swim. We view pain as a symptom, the byproduct of something that can be identified and then cured, said Ryan Brown in. (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 364 pages, $27)
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