Cicely Saunders and Total Pain

This book offers the first full-length study of Cicely Saunders’s idea of ‘total pain’, providing a fresh perspective on the ambiguous place of narrative in healthcare. Introduced in 1964, Cicely Saunders’s term ‘total pain’ has come to epitomise the holistic ethos of hospice and palliative care. It communicates how a dying person’s pain can be a whole overwhelming experience, not only physical but also psychological, social and spiritual. ‘Total pain’ clearly summarises Saunders’s whole-person, multidisciplinary outlook but is it a phenomenon, an intervention framework, a care approach – or something else? This book disregards the idea that Saunders’s phrase has one coherent meaning and instead explores the multiple interpretations now current in contemporary professional discourse. Using close readings of Saunders’s extensive publications, as well as archival evidence and Saunders’s own personal library, Wood situates the current usage of ‘total pain’ in wider histories of clinical holism, questions its similarity to later ideas of narrative medicine and explores how it might express the ambiguities of bearing witness to pain and vulnerability when someone is dying. In doing so, the book challenges the dominance and meaning of narrative in the health humanities by exploring its relevance within an end-of-life context. It brings together extensive close reading of Saunders’ written output and archival sources with current theoretical approaches in the health humanities for the first time in order to explore the discourse and vocabulary surrounding a taken-for-granted clinical term.