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The comments about assisted suicide and those about medicine creating a pain-free world started me thinking about pain and its ability to affect other areas of experience besides the senses and perception. The line of thinking that the experience of extreme pain can impair consent or even make informed consent impossible has long been used to justify prohibiting physician assisted suicide. I think there's a lot of merit in this argument. I also think it's interesting that pain is clearly not an objective, encapsulated physical phenomenon. Its effects branch out into a variety of other cognitive capacities.

I'd also like to return to a comment made in class about pain as it is seen as a rite of passage. In many cultures, extreme physical endurance and scarification practices mark a boy or a girl for adulthood. In class, I struggled to think of an example in Western culture, but perhaps I've stumbled off of one. I'm sure many of us, male and female alike, are familiar with the natural birth dilemma that many pregnant women face. I once learned in Anthro 101 that it's anthropology's job to make "the strange familiar and the familiar strange" and I think that a study of pain really gets that message across. I can't help wondering what's behind these rituals that, in a sense, glorify pain and especially the body's ability to withstand pain. This subject is departing from many of the more central questions discussed in the forum and in class, but I would welcome any comments!