| Abstract |
It's hard to imagine pain as a "gift," but that's the compelling conclusion of Dr. Paul Brand, who has spent his remarkable life studying pain and its implications for medical treatment, overall health, and human happiness. From Paul Brand, M.D., and Philip Yancey, who have collaborated on the bestselling Fearfully and Wonderfully Made and In His Image, here is the inspiring story of Dr. Brand's fifty-year career as a healer. Born to missionary parents in India, Paul Brand grew up in exotic circumstances that helped to form his view of the key role pain plays in human health. We follow Dr. Brand from his early years in India, where physical pain is expected and tolerated much more so than in the West, through his almost accidental medical training in wartime England, and then on to his return to India, where his work as a hand surgeon led to astonishing breakthroughs in the treatment of leprosy. Most of the ravages of that disease, he found, trace back to the simple loss of pain sensation: without the protection of pain, leprosy patients were destroying themselves. Dr. Brand's career carried him next to America's famous Carville, Louisiana, leprosarium, where his pioneering work also provided fascinating insights into treatment for other more common ailments, such as diabetes. From a lifetime of discoveries about the sensation of pain, Dr. Brand has come to an unusual acceptance of pain as a necessary part of our lives and an important ally in medical treatment and true health. In this provocative book, Dr. Brand discusses eloquently the personal and societal implications of this country's inability to accept or deal with pain, and provides a strong case for each individual to learn how to make a friend of pain. "For good and for ill," he concludes, "the human species has among its priviledges the preeminence of pain ... feats of consciousness make it possible for suffering to loiter in the mind long after the body's need for it has passed. Yet they also give us the potential to attain an outlook that will change the very landscape of the pain experience. We can learn to cope, and even to triumph." |
