Word: painful
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...other) hobby? Dr. Bowes answered: "His tendency to become preoccupied with, and dependent upon, the bizarre recorded sounds . . . combined with the urgency of the need and the final insufficiency of all attempts to satisfy it ... The sound is turned up and up until it reaches the physical level of pain . . . One addict told me he would not be satisfied until he could hear the drop of saliva from the French horns...
...startling spectacle of the Indian fakir snuggled down on his bed of nails, or the martyr thrusting his hand into the flames, has often been explained by medical science on the basis of emotional disturbances (usually hysteria). In other cases, failure to react to pain may be due to severe mental retardation or physical damage to the nervous system. But there remains a baffling group of individuals to whom none of these explanations can be applied, and who show no reaction to pain of virtually any kind...
...textbooks, eventually drifted back to English teaching. Embers from the red hot prose that set the Jazz Age afire: "The musicians played as if in a frenzy, the drums pound-pounding a terrible tom-tom, the saxophones moaning and wailing, the violins singing sensuously, shrilly as if in pain, an exquisite, searing pain . . . Close-packed the couples moved slowly about the gymnasium, body pressed tight to body, swaying in place-boom, boom, boom, boom...
Their testing came in December, 1951, when nine-year-old Gabrielle, "a long-legged, sun-kissed little girl, full of lively, irrepressible spirits," went to bed with a stomachache. Slowly, the symptoms multiplied: vomiting, difficulty in breathing, sharper attacks of pain followed by extreme lassitude. The doctor thought it was a virus infection. Another doctor diagnosed infectious hepatitis. Stomach X-rays suggested that a small tumor might be to blame. Nothing to worry about, said the doctors, but they advised an operation...
...learn this hard-won truth. She was determined not to surrender to the physical corruption inside her. "After all," she said, "it's only the body." In the hospital room the struggle was fought with blood transfusions, morphine injections, intravenous feeding, catheterizations. The child was wrenched with pain, grew more and more emaciated as bedsores spread across her sensitive skin, and it became increasingly difficult to find places to insert the daily needles. But there were pauses, too, when death drew back as if exhausted. There were enough of these precious moments for the creation of rituals. Each night...