by Martha Stoddard Holmes

About Martha Stoddard Holmes

Martha Stoddard Holmes is Professor of Literature and Writing Studies at California State University, San Marcos. She is the author of Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture (2004) and coeditor of The Teacher’s Body: Embodiment, Authority, and Identity in the Academy (2003) and has published extensively on the cultural history of the body from the Victorian era to the present, including Victorian representations of disability and the public culture of cancer. She is currently working on a graphic narrative (comic) about ovarian cancer. Stoddard Holmes is Associate Editor of Literature and Medicine, the Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.

Pain

book Keywords for Disability Studies

Pain’s associations with disability as it is experienced, imagined, and beheld are multiple and long-standing. People with disabilities have habitually been imagined as “suffering from” impairment and “afflicted by” disability, the diction suggesting both physical and psychic pain. The nuances and complex consequences of this conceptualization of disability are dynamic throughout various time periods. Pain has its etymological roots in words from Indo-European, ancient Greek, and classical Latin signifiying penality (such as Latin poena), punishment, and revenge (i.e., ancient Greek ποινή or blood money). In the fourth century, words for pain acquired the meanings of suffering and affliction, in effect shifting the focus from the purpose of pain to the experience of pain (Oxford English Dictionary).