But the symposium called attention to a dilemma facing clinicians and American society at large—one that has unfolded in conference rooms, statehouses, and courts. The day’s roster of speakers, all men in suits, sat in the front row. In addition to the ER chief, the state medical examiner and another doctor, there were several current or former Drug Enforcement Administration officials, the head of the state’s Division of Consumer Affairs, a malpractice lawyer, the state’s first assistant attorney general, an adviser from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and a representative from Actavis, a pharmaceutical company. The U.S. Attorney for New Jersey showed up as well, warning of society’s “cavalier” attitude toward prescription drugs and vowing to prosecute unscrupulous doctors. The only woman on the panel, a suburban mother whose young adult son died of a heroin overdose, sat toward the back of the room.

There was no mistaking the focus of the day: thorny legal issues rather than lessons in care. If the audience came expecting guidance in the clinical management of pain, they went away disappointed. Who gets to measure suffering? Who draws the line between legitimate relief and drug abuse? Was it the pharmaceutical rep, who told the group that “100 million Americans suffer from chronic pain” (an industry statistic often invoked, but seldom explained)? The state officials, who threatened to revoke physicians’ licenses? The doctors, who urged caution, or the lawyers, who warned of malpractice suits? Or was it the mother, who tearfully recounted her son’s progression from legal painkillers to heroin?

Physical pain is not merely a private struggle. Pain is also a problem of representation and trust, of rights and responsibilities, and a source of tension between individual and community. Perhaps not surprisingly, efforts to manage it give rise to a chronic American condition: an intimate, unknowable experience co-opted by special interests. Pain, in short, is political.

That is the argument Keith Wailoo, a Princeton historian of medicine and public policy scholar, makes in Pain: A Political History, which sets out to show “how the powerful question of other people’s pain became a recurring site for political battle.” Wailoo’s account begins with the post-World War II challenge of caring for disabled veterans, and proceeds through conflicts over entitlement programs, “fetal pain,” euthanasia, and the rise of OxyContin. Wailoo identifies pain as the impetus, and often proxy, for debates—played out in courtrooms as much as in doctors’ offices—about not just health care, but government regulation, business, constitutional rights, and the American character.

Our modern culture of pain management is a product of this history. So is our modern crisis of opiate addiction. Even 60 years ago, Wailoo writes, “the issues embedded in pain management were profound in their moral, fiscal, and civic implications.” For Eisenhower, the decision of how much public relief to devote to private pain— specifically, in military hospitals—was influenced by considerations of grit, sacrifice, and virtue. Eisenhower would “not allow mere sympathy to drive government expansion,” Wailoo writes; he signed the 1956 law creating Social Security Disability Insurance with more than a little ambivalence. During the following decade, the debate over pain broadened, as mortality from infectious diseases gave way to chronic, degenerative ailments. The shift reflected an affluent, aging society, and a workforce expanding fitfully to include women and African Americans. Courts embraced a liberal, subjective standard of “real” pain, rejecting the notion that discomfort was a fact of life; those who in earlier years might have been dismissed as malingerers were now guaranteed treatment and protection. Medicare and Medicaid were born, and a “bureaucracy of relief” grew throughout the 1960s and 1970s.