Chronic pain is pain that lasts for months, years or even a lifetime, and doctors have a hard time understanding it. Not only is it sometimes impossible to cure, but doctors also tend to fixate on bodily pain and not address the ways pain is also psychological and emotional. In fact, Travis Chi Wing Lau argues that this attitude goes back to the ways doctors have been trained since the eighteenth century to observe outer bodily symptoms and discount patients’ subjective experiences. Turning to Travis’s poetry, we discuss why we need poets as well as doctors to understand pain.
Tag: Bible
Pick up a novel today, and it’s almost guaranteed to be divided up into chapters. But that hasn’t always been the case. The chapter had to be invented. English professor Nick Dames has been studying this history. In this episode, he talks with us about how the chapter first came to be — and how writers have reinvented it over the centuries.