Pain: medical history and premises of sociological analysis

For a long time, pain, like other issues related to the corporeality of a person, was beyond the sphere of sociological interest. Since the second half of the 20th century, the situation has been changing, and the established models of the "disembodied" actor have been gradually denied. It is still too early to claim that sociology of pain is an established domain of research, but Mark Zborowski's People in Pain (1969) made a substantive contribution into studying pain as a complex phenomenon embracing physiological as well as psychological, cognitive and social aspects. Despite the methodological and conceptual differences, sociological approaches to the study of pain share a common feature that is a protest against the reductionist, unidimensional approach to pain that obtained a dominant position in the scientific discourse due to medical influence. Sociologists highlight that pain is always subjective, while medical representatives, being the main source of a "valid" knowledge of pain, are inclined to leave this subjectivity beyond their analysis. The article examines how the attitude towards pain in medicine has changed with time in order to understand what the prerequisites for the appearance of pain issues in the focus of sociological analysis were. The achievements of medicine promoted the transition from treating pain as an independent entity, conceptualised in terms of the mythological, the supernatural, to considering it only as a concomitant sign of physiological damage, without any independent value. The development of medical technologies has made it possible to proceed to such methods of diagnosing, in which patient's complaints become irrelevant, and it is possible to reach the disease "directly" without resorting to subjective factors. This reduction of personality to an organism as a mechanism that went out of order caused a certain protest from sociologists and promoted the increased interest in studying such issues. Meanwhile, at the moment in medical science too there have been significant shifts in the study of pain: first, it regained its independent status, which was reflected in the formation of a specific domain of pain studies and the creation of a specialised international association, and, second, an evidence base was accumulated that confirms that the relationship between the pain stimulus and pain as such is far from unambiguous and depends on many factors, including social ones.

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