IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v69y2009i5p655-661.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

From pleasure to pain: The role of the MPQ in the language of phantom limb pain

Author

Listed:
  • Crawford, Cassandra S.

Abstract

In opposition to the argument that pain is private, personal and unsharable, I propose that the intersubjectivity of pain is fundamental to it. Using the case of phantom limb, I show how a specific language of pain emerged and became concretized in the US circa 1975 with the advent of the McGill Pain Questionnaire (MPQ). Through widespread use of the MPQ, a language of pain materialized, one that was commonly used to describe the qualitative dimensions of phantom limb. After 1975, the terminology used within the medical literature was overwhelmingly consonant with the set of descriptors advanced by the MPQ. The utilization of a pain questionnaire to assess the qualitative dimensions of phantom limb effectively accentuated pain, and by 1980, what was once considered relatively rare became a common sequela of phantom manifestation.

Suggested Citation

  • Crawford, Cassandra S., 2009. "From pleasure to pain: The role of the MPQ in the language of phantom limb pain," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 69(5), pages 655-661, September.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:69:y:2009:i:5:p:655-661
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(09)00104-X
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Baszanger, Isabelle, 1989. "Pain: Its experience and treatments," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 425-434, January.
    2. Vrancken, Mariet A. E., 1989. "Schools of thought on pain," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 435-444, January.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Stone, Meredith & Kokanovic, Renata, 2016. "“Halfway towards recovery”: Rehabilitating the relational self in narratives of postnatal depression," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 163(C), pages 98-106.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Jale Yazar & Roland Littlewood, 2001. "Against Over-Interpretation: the Understanding of Pain Amongst Turkish and Kurdish Speakers in London," International Journal of Social Psychiatry, , vol. 47(2), pages 20-33, June.
    2. Gisquet, Elsa, 2008. "Cerebral implants and Parkinson's disease: A unique form of biographical disruption?," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 67(11), pages 1847-1851, December.
    3. Kathy Charmaz & Virginia Olesen, 1997. "Ethnographic Research in Medical Sociology," Sociological Methods & Research, , vol. 25(4), pages 452-494, May.
    4. Dassieu, Lise & Kaboré, Jean-Luc & Choinière, Manon & Arruda, Nelson & Roy, Élise, 2020. "Painful lives: Chronic pain experience among people who use illicit drugs in Montreal (Canada)," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 246(C).
    5. Simon Williams & Ellen Annandale & Jonathan Tritter, 1998. "The Sociology of Health and Illness at the Turn of the Century: Back to the Future?," Sociological Research Online, , vol. 3(4), pages 64-79, December.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:69:y:2009:i:5:p:655-661. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.