It was as if a phantom had entered the hospital. The unclaimed bodies had been swiftly transported to the local medical school for dissection. While the Anatomical Act of 1832 reduced the prevalence of grave robbers, this law made it such that poverty was the defining factor in whether or not a corpse would be dissected [1]. Dissection, which had been previously reserved for the most vile crimes like murder, was now a penalty faced by many poor working class people in England [1].
Before dissection was relegated to the poor, it was reserved for felons; prior to dissection, felons were subject to punishments both painful and humiliating [2]. Capital punishment involved the gallows and for those guilty of less serious offenses, there were the stocks, the branding iron, or the skimmington ride [2]. This was all seen as “morally fitting”. And what of those who are subject to these painful ordeals? While pain is undeniable to those experiencing it, it is always doubted by outsiders [3]. For many in power, 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 person in pain [3].
Let’s extend this doubt to Mary Douglas and John O’Neill’s concepts of the three bodies [4]. For the individual body, is the person actually experiencing pain as bad they make it out to be? For the social body, how is that socially, we deem certain groups to be deceptive in expressing their pain and, as an extension, morally deserving of pain? Finally, for the body politic, how do individuals with authority determine, as outsiders, if a punishment or mechanism of control is sufficiently painful for a person? How can we feel that we have the right to make these moral judgments? I hope to explore the role of doubt in the three bodies’ experiences with pain using sound through this project.
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Description: This soundscape begins with a patient recounting a painful experience to a physician in a clinical encounter. This account becomes muffled as the patient’s words, and therefore experiences of pain, are “tuned out”. Sounds of different qualities then cut in and out, signaling various thresholds of pain, with more piercing sounds corresponding to higher levels of pain and duller sounds corresponding to lower levels of pain. While the patient experiences intense pain, the physician holds doubt that this is true and instead believes the pain to be more manageable and less intense. Another sound signals the transition away from this clinical encounter to a discussion of pain as punishment in public, in 1700s England, where punishments such as branding and whipping were administered to those who were deemed “deserving” based on their committed offenses. I will replicate the sounds that an individual’s body might make under these conditions, adding a feeling of discomfort and squeamishness that comes with hearing the sound of the body in pain. Like pain, we often associate sound with an object. Does it increase the certainty of pain if we were to associate a sound, and therefore an object, with it? What if this sound isn’t even made by the object we think is making it? Finally suspense continues into mid 1800s England, when the Anatomy Act was passed. With these two sections, I hope to inquire, how do individuals and institutions of power, as outsiders, determine what punishments are sufficiently painful and morally fit for another individual? How is it that we feel that we have the right to make these moral assumptions about this appropriateness if we are unable to believe what others tell us about their pain? Finally, we abruptly return to the clinical encounter at the beginning of the soundscape, where the physician voices doubt at the patient’s pain unless medical imaging can show them otherwise. The patient’s own protests fade into the background.
Notes
[1] Ghosh, Sanjib Kumar. “Human Cadaveric Dissection: A Historical Account from Ancient Greece to the Modern Era.” Anatomy & Cell Biology, vol. 48, no. 3, Sept. 2015, p. 153., https://doi.org/10.5115/acb.2015.48.3.153.
[2] Porter, Roy. Bodies Politic: Disease, Death and Doctors in Britain, 1650-1900 (Picturing History). Cornell University Press, 2001.
[3] Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford University Press, 2006.
[4] Scheper-Hughes, Nancy, and Margaret M. Lock. “The Mindful Body: A Prolegomenon to Future Work in Medical Anthropology.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 1, 1987, pp. 6–41, http://www.jstor.org/stable/648769. Accessed 6 May 2022.