Keywords
grief
medicine
reading
How to Cite
Abstract
There are many reasons to conceive pain as a multidimensional experience: it involves
body and mind, depends on cultural and social structures, and is hard to define. Indeed,
it belongs to the emotional realm, but can also operate as a sensation and be connected to a
disease. In our time, the identification and the treatment of pain are mainly under the responsibility
of medicine. However, in order to fully understand suffering, adopting only the scientific
perspective is not enough, whereas a broader and eclectic vision may provide a more complete
understanding of the phenomenon. This is exactly what literature has to offer, by relying on
countless representative and expressive tools, and often staging productive encounters with
the scientific language. Therefore, we will focus on some contemporary literary works which
show a particular interest in pain and question its role within a medical frame too. In particular,
we will outline an itinerary which aims to shed light on the functions, limits and contributions
of each approach to suffering.
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