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This won't hurt a bit: the cultural history of pain

On 16 April 1872, a woman signing herself “An Earnest Eng­lishwoman” published a letter in the Times. It was entitled “Are Women Animals?”.

She was clearly very angry. Her fury had been fuelled by recent court cases in which a man who had “coolly knocked out” the eye of his mistress and another man who had killed his wife were imprisoned for just a few months each. In contrast, a man who had stolen a watch was punished severely, sentenced to not only seven years’ penal servitude, but also 40 lashes of the “cat”. She noted that although some people might believe that a watch was an “object of greater value than the eye of a mistress or the life of a wife”, she was asking readers to remember that “the inanimate watch does not suffer”. It must cause acute agony for any “living creature, endowed with nerves and muscles, to be blinded or crushed to death”.

Indeed, she continued, she had “read of heavier sentences being inflicted for cruelty towards that – may I venture to say? – lower creation”. She pleaded for women to be subsumed under legislation forbidding cruelty to animals, because that would improve their position in law.

Speculation about the degree to which human beings and animals experienced pain has a long history, but “An Earnest Englishwoman” was writing at a very important time in these debates. Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man had been published the year before her letter, and his Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals appeared in 1872. Both Darwin and “An Earnest Englishwoman” were addressing a central question that had intrigued theologians, scientists, philosophers, psychologists and other social commentators for centuries: how can we know how other people feel?

The reason this question was so important was that many people didn’t believe that all human beings (let alone non-human animals) were equally capable of suffering. Scientists and philosophers pointed to the existence of a hierarchy of sentience. Belief in a great “Chain of Being”, according to which everything in the universe was ranked from the highest to the lowest, is a fundamental tenet of western philosophy. One aspect of this Chain of Being involved the perception of sensation. There was a parallel great Chain of Feeling, which placed male Europeans at one end and slaves and animals at the other...

Read entire article at New Statesman