Up-to-date medical knowledge is combined with the definition of pain in Western literature and culture. "The experience of pain as shaped by individual minds and specific cultures, from tortured victims of the Inquisition to the Nazi death camps, the phantom limb pain of amputees and the suffering of victims of arthritis, disability, cancer and AIDS".--Publishers Weekly. Illustrated.
David Morris is a writer-scholar (recently retired as University Professor at the University of Virginia) who has written numerous essays and two prize-winning books in eighteenth-century studies--*The Religious Sublime* (1972) and *Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense* (1984). *The Culture of Pain* (1991) won a PEN prize and has been translated into German, Spanish, and Japanese. Other books include *Earth Warrior* (1995), which describes an anti-driftnet campaign in the North Pacific with environmental activist Paul Watson, and *Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age* (1998), translated into German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Serbian.
He has lectured and written on pain for a wide variety of audiences, including an award-winning article in Arthritis Today, as well as plenary addresses at annual meetings of the American Pain Society, American Academy of Pain Medicine, American Society for Pain Management Nurses, and The International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). He is also founding co-director of the annual (weeklong) Taos Writing Retreat for Health Professionals, co-sponsored by Kaiser-Permanente and the University of New Mexico School of Medicine.
Selected recent essays include "How To Speak Postmodern: Medicine, Illness, and Culture" in The Hastings Center Report (2000); "The Poetry of Absence" in *The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry* (2001); "Success Stories: Narrative, Pain, and the Limits of Storylessness,"in *Narrative, Pain, and Suffering*, ed. Carr, Loeser, and Morris (2005); "Eros Modigliani," The Iowa Review (2006); "Un-Forgetting Asclepius: An Erotics of Illness," New Literary History (2007); "Biocultures Manifesto," New Literary History (2007), co-authored with Lennard J. Davis; "Bedside Eros," Atrium (2009); "Sociocultural Dimensions of Pain Management," in *Bonica's Management of Pain*, 4th edn. (forthcoming); and "Dark Ecology: Sacramental Humanscape in "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell," ISLE (forthcoming).
