Photo by John Sheretz

"The Cultural Politics of Pain, from Percodan to Kevorkian"

Keith Wailoo, Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History and founding director, Center for Race and Ethnicity, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

Free and open to the public

During the last half-century, the relatively new area of pain medicine has provoked ongoing controversy, touching on profound cultural questions and igniting heated political debates. When is pain real? What are the limits to understanding patients’ experiences with pain? What is addiction and does generous pain relief create addiction? What is to be done when pain medicine segues into physician-assisted suicide or euthanasia? Keith Wailoo will explore the complex history of this controversial area of medical care and situate America’s struggles with pain and pain relief within a broader, ongoing debate about liberalism and conservatism in American medicine, culture, and society.

Wailoo is the Martin Luther King Jr. Professor of History at Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, with joint appointments in the department of history and in the Institute for Health, Health Care Policy, and Aging Research. He is also the founding director of the Center for Race and Ethnicity at Rutgers. His award-winning books include The Troubled Dream of Genetic Medicine: Ethnicity and Innovation in Tay-Sachs, Cystic Fibrosis, Sickle Cell Disease, coauthored with Stephen Pemberton (John Hopkins University Press, 2006); Dying in the City of the Blues: Sickle Cell Anemia and the Politics of Race and Health (University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Drawing Blood: Technology and Disease in Twentieth-Century America (John Hopkins University Press, 1997). He is currently completing two new books: How Cancer Crossed the Color Line: Race and Disease in America (Oxford University Press, 2008) and “Pain: The Cultural Politics of Relief in America.”

Wailoo was the recipient of the prestigious James S. McDonnell Centennial Fellowship in the History and Philosophy of Science. His research has been supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Investigator Award in Health Policy, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Burroughs Wellcome Fund. He was a 2006–2007 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.