Keith Wailoo. Pain: A Political History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014. $29.95. pp. 284. Paper. ISBN: 9781421413655.

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/wmh3.223
• Published date: 01 March 2017
• Date: 01 March 2017

Book Review

Keith Wailoo. Pain: A Political History. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 2014. $29.95. pp. 284. Paper. ISBN: 9781421413655.

Pain: A Political History describes a “history of liberalism, conservatism, and

pain” to explain how American policies, practices, and attitudes concerning pain

evolved over f‌ive eras of the 20th and early 21st centuries, with a particular focus

on who judges the legitimacy of various pains and how.

The book devotes one chapter to each of the f‌ive eras, each characterizing a

different shift in the politics of pain but contributing to the same theme: that the

problem of pain in America is driven by and further drives a tension between

liberal compassion and conservative care. The history begins in the 1950s, after

World War II gave way to an economic boom and a rise in disabled veterans.

Proponents of liberalized compassion saw an opportunity and an obligation to

compensate veterans living with pain and other disabilities, while proponents of

conservative care saw disability compensation as an incentive for malingering, a

slippery slope to nationalized health care, and a threat to American values of

endurance and independence. Marking the f‌irst major shift in pain politics,

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican and U.S. Army General,

collaborated with a primarily Democratic Congress and Senate to sign Social

Security Disability Insurance (SSDI) into law, granting compensation to American

citizens whose disability or pain was deemed deserving.

Each era in the political history of pain is def‌ined by such a shift, and an

increasing divide between liberal and conservative perspectives of legitimate pain

and appropriate pain relief. Following the introduction of SSDI, legal debates in

the 1960s and 1970s ruled that subjective pain claims were enough to legitimize

an individual’s pain. Due in part to these legal debates, pain medicine was

legitimized as a medical f‌ield in its own right, and the credence given to

subjective pain experiences led to wider acceptance of alternative pain treatment

methods. However, following this era of widespread pain compensation and pain

complaint acceptance, the 1980s ushered in an era of widespread skepticism, as

Republican President Ronald Reagan called for a massive review of disability

claims to identify and dismiss the frauds whose false claims created an

World Medical & Health Policy, Vol. 9, No. 1, 2017

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1948-4682 #2017 Policy Studies Organization

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