Listening to Pain

One of New York magazine’s Top Doctors, David Biro, MD, practices in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at the State University of New York Downstate Medical Center. He lives with his wife and twin boys in New York City.

"This well-researched book will be helpful to medical professionals and psychologists as well as those who suffer from chronic or extreme pain, offering encouragement and inspiration for explaining their experiences to their doctors." "Thoughtful, lyrical... We should pay attention to Biro's difficult, complicated lesson." "[E]rudite and ambitious...Biro brings an extraordinary range of voices into this silence and moves through a huge variety of experience and narrative, without straying too far from the bedside." -- Perri Klass "True genius... Biro creates a larger portrait of pain, deftly addressing the physical as well as psychological aspects of the human experience of pain... An important and unique contribution." -- Preeti N. Malani, MD "A literate and deeply felt work of medical philosophy that ponders the subtle mystery of how words give meaning to-and even relief from-corporeal and psychic anguish." -- Andrew Solomon, author of The Noonday Demon "The book highlights the need to understand how we communicate our pain to one another-especially in people suffering excruciating pain and unable to communicate their suffering to their doctors. The consequences can be disastrous." -- Ronald Melzack, author of The Challenge of Pain "Biro's meditation on pain beautifully distills metaphors of experience from literature, medicine, and real life. The author reveals how patients, struggling against isolation, reach out with words to touch their pain, and, in the process, touch others. Human connections transform pain for this doctor (and patient), who builds a welcoming bridge between clinical medicine and the humanities. Bravo!" -- Arthur Kleinman, author of The Illness Narratives "David Biro makes effective use of his ability to write as a physician, as a literary scholar, and as someone who has faced a life-threatening illness. The Language of Pain breaks new ground both as a study of metaphor and as a demonstration of the clinical relevance of literary texts. Clinicians who treat pain, people struggling to express their own pain, and scholars of literature and medicine will find much to appreciate in this book." -- Arthur W. Frank, author of The Wounded Storyteller