#(‘there is a pain – so utter –’: narrating chronic pain and disability in antiquity and modernity by georgia petridou is the chapter)

[catominor]

crying over this chronic pain chapter again bcs of the part about how people read aelius aristides' account of his own pain and illness and called him a hypochondriac and that he was exaggerating. ourghhh......

[catominor]

this chapter (Petridou, Georgia, "There is a pain - so utter-: Narrating chronic pain and disability in antiquity and modernity" in Disability Studies and the Classical Body: The Forgotten Other ed. Ellen Adams, Routledge, 2021) is really giving me some insight into really how cruel society could and can be to people who have chronic pain. it talks about aelius aristidies, a greek orator from the 2nd century ce who suffered from some kind of chronic debilitating illness and wrote about it, and how even in modern scholarship about him people don't really believe what he wrote about his own experience of illness and label him a hypochondriac. the author also writes a lot about examples of positive and negative physician/patient relationships in regards to the treatment of chronic pain, including examples from aristides' writing.