"...Whatever pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability and ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language. 'English', writes Virginia Woolf, 'which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear has no words for the shiver or the headache... The merest schoolgirl when she falls in love has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her, but let a sufferer try to describe pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.' True of the headache, Woolf's account is of course more radically true of the severe and prolonged pain that may accompany cancer or burns or phantom limb or stroke [or M.E.], as well as of the severe and prolonged pain that may occur unaccompanied by any nameable disease. Physical pain does not simply resist language but actively destroys it, bringing about an immediate reversion to a state anterior to language, to the sounds and cries a human being makes before language is learned..."...for physical pain - unlike any other state of consciousness - has no referential content. It is not of or for anything. It is precisely because it takes no object that it, more than any other phenomenon, resists objectification in language...
"...the conclusion that physicians do not trust (hence, hear) the human voice, that they in effect perceive the voice of the patient as an 'unreliable narrator' of bodily events, a voice which must be bypassed as quickly as possible so that they can get around and behind it to the physical events themselves [blood work, CT, etc]. But if the only external sign of the felt-experience of pain is the patient's verbal report, then to bypass the voice is to bypass the bodily event, to bypass the patient, to bypass the person in pain..."
Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain, 1985
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