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The Fifth Vital Sign: An Anthropological Analysis Of Productive And Unproductive Pain, Kathleen Meerscheidt
The Fifth Vital Sign: An Anthropological Analysis Of Productive And Unproductive Pain, Kathleen Meerscheidt
Honors Theses
Throughout my time as a Division I rower, I have struggled to understand the ways that I understand my own normalization of pain within a broader cultural environment that portrays pain as a mostly negative aspect of life. This moral quandary inspired me to start researching the role of pain in different socio-cultural contexts. For my thesis, I conducted original research, in the form of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, to build on what I found through an extensive literature review. First, I looked at the ways in which pain is understood within Western biomedicine and, subsequently, “Western” culture. Within …