Photographs: Looking for/at ‘Total Pain’

In this chapter, I begin to explore ‘total pain’ in the context of Cicely Saunders’s interest in silence, starting with her use of photography in her lectures and published work. Saunders ‘snap’-like photographs aspire to de-medicalise how professionals look at dying patients, reframing them as people rather than medical subjects. Assessed alongside Saunders’s interest in Christian existentialist theology, these images echo Saunders’s wider ethos of attention and looking in which the assumed complexity of ‘total pain’ begets a form of looking that anticipates, and seeks connection with, complexity and ambiguity without recourse to narrative articulation. I link this approach to Saunders’s redemptive sense of bearing witness to her patients as existing on the edge of time, both living and dying – an idea with ambiguous implications for clinical practice.