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This chapter begins by affirming the medical distinction between acute pain and chronic pain. It then discusses pain within a theoretical framework that divides illness between two large forces: medical eros and medical logos. While medical logos incorporates the familiar reason-based scientific molecular gaze of contemporary biomedicine, medical eros is an unfamiliar term that refers to the various ways that desire is expressed in the context of medicine, health, and illness. The chapter builds an argument holding that eros (or desire) and narrative have a crucial, connected role to play in the medical understanding and treatment of pain. This role is especially important for ethics. Bioethics is traditionally a discipline in which principles are the main focus. In an extended discussion of the 1944 film The Great Moment—which dramatizes the discovery of surgical anesthesia—the chapter concludes with an argument, based on the work of philosopher Emanuel Levinas, in which pain becomes a key test case for an ethics that sees in "the face" an image or metaphor for the infinite otherness of the other person. Medical eros thus serves to promote an ethics of pain opposed to the engineered and incidental facelessness of much contemporary medicine—and life.

DOI: 10.1007/978-81-322-2601-7_7

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