| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 112.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Thomas Dormandy. The Worst of Evils: The Fight against Pain. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press. 2006. Pp. x, 547. $35.00.
Both a universal human experience, and one that is felt uniquely by each individual as well as being differently managed and interpreted within different cultures and social settings, pain is receiving significant scholarly attention these days. From headaches, childbirth, and chronic pain to torture, and from professional intellectual to popular social perspectives, new research offers increasingly nuanced exploration of pain's meanings, uses, and remedies. Intended as a contribution to this scholarship, Thomas Dormandy's book is an encyclopedic summary of Western medical attempts to ease patients' discomfort from the beginning of recorded time to the present.	1
It reads like a chronologically organized Western Civilization textbook, where successive eras identified by traditional consensus are viewed through the lens of pain management. Beginning in "The mists of history" with ancient use of analgesics including wine and opium, it proceeds through early Christianity and medieval Islamic maintenance of classical medicine to "Scientific stirrings" when early gas therapies gave promise of greater relief to come. "Painless surgery" created by the introduction of ether and chloroform gives way to "The beginning of the modern" when new drugs made possible local and chronic pain relief. Finally, "Yesteryears" recognizes both twentieth-century advances in pain management and the limits to further progress posed by chronic physical and mental illness.	. . .

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