NO-PAIN GAINS

The radical development of a new painkiller.

- RIVKA GALCHEN

Pain might flicker, flash, prickle, drill, lancinate, pinch, cramp, tug, scald, sear, or itch. It might be blinding, or gruelling, or annoying, and it might, additionally, radiate, squeeze, or tear with an intensity that is mild, distressing, or excruciating. Yet understanding someone else's pain is like understanding another person's dream. The dreamer searches out the right words to communicate it; the words are always insufficient and imprecise. In 1971, the psychologist Ronald Melzack developed a vocabulary for pain, to make communication less cloudy. His McGill Pain Questionnaire, versions of which are still in use today, comprises seventy-eight words, divided into twenty groups, with an additional five words to describe intensity and nine to describe pain's relationship to time, from transient to intermittent to constant. Not included in the M.P.Q. is the language that Friedrich Nietzsche used in describing the migraines that afflicted him: “I have given a name to my pain and call it ‘dog.’ It is just as faithful, just as obtrusive and shameless, just as entertaining, just as clever as any other dog.”