Bibliographic record
Abstract
If one knows Joanna Bourke's books, the intellectual thrust of The Story of Pain will not surprise. It is the latest in her significant corpus to stress the cultural construction of linguistic and bodily practices and their political implications. Bourke is interested always in disrupting the rhetoric of the ‘normal’, the ‘banal’ and the ‘universal’, insisting that experience is historically contingent and that discourses of normativity serve always to include and exclude, privilege or hinder, according to who or what controls these discursive threads. In this case, the focus is divided equally between the experience of being in pain and the medical history of dealing with pain. Mediating these two poles is a cultural history, spanning three centuries, of the polyphony of experts who have instructed humans how to ‘do’ pain. These prescriptions for how pain should be managed, experienced, felt, ignored, mediated or instrumentalised have come from the institutions of the state, religion, the military, medicine, popular culture, the pharmaceutical industry and from university laboratories of various descriptions. Bourke casts a critical eye over all of them, charting the ways in which the policing of pain expressions, particularly the language of pain, has directly affected the subjective experience of being in pain. At the same time, the experience of being in pain has influenced the language of pain, the historicity of which is carefully monitored here. The medical response to pain experience seems to have depended principally on the extent to which patient testimony has been considered useful or important to physicians. Bourke clearly marks a long-term trend in which patients' testimony about their own pain has been drained of its diagnostic value, as clinicians seek more ‘objective’ measures, either by providing (and thus delimiting) the language of pain (e.g. the McGill Pain Questionnaire), or by attempting graphically to measure pain (e.g. through fMRI). Lurking in the background is the suspicion that the veracity of pain testimony in the case of certain sufferers—women, soldiers, the overly civilised, racial Others, the poor—is in doubt.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.013 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.009 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".