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My reading of "The Gift of Pain" by Dr. Paul Brand and Phillip Yancey

Yancey and Brand's "The Gift of Pain," is more or less a memoir centering not around any certain life events in the life of the late Dr. Paul Brand but simply around the theme of Pain, or rather it's experience by himself and those around him. Naturally, since the book did not really center around any specific event, it does not convey any unifying message, and makes for a somewhat incoherent and choppy read. It is more like sitting down with the Doctor himself and listening to him lecture to you for 300 pages about his life. Though a good premise for a book, using pain as the only unifiying theme of a man's memoir is somewhat ambitious and must be explored from many more perspectives and must draw from much more to really DO something with it. Unfortunately, "The Gift of Pain" does not DO that something and offers no extraordinary insights into pain itself. 

But it does have value in that it does chronicle the life of a leprosy doctor who worked in India, a unique perspective.  This book was published by an evangelical publisher and recieved the Gold Medallion Book Award "in recognition of excellence in evanglical christian literature." Paul  Brand's parents were both missionaries and he himself was christian, which isn't necessarily made clear throughout the book. He does not  clarify his beliefs but simply talks about his religion when it pertains to "pain." One particular instance is when he repeats his coined motto: "Thank God for pain," at various times throughout the book. The title of the book also promises a somewhat spiritual book, perhaps some kind of self-help book. However, the contents reveal it to be somewhat of a memoir or even a study of pain, coming from the perspective of a doctor, which can at times be objective. Though the title may reflect the original intent of the Authors I believe that as with many works of writing, the work diverted from it's original blueprint and became something else entirely. A more befitting title for "The Gift of Pain" could be "The Life and Work of Doctor Paul Brand," as that is what is discussed in the most thoroughness. 

Interestingly enough, the only insights I myself found worthwhile in the book (some 300 pages) had nothing to with pain but rather with the mind and it's potential. In the first instance, Dr. Brand recounts his days as a budding medical student when he disected an Irishman's brain. "Looking at the Welshman's brain through the magnifying loops, I could see the upper end of the nerve "tree," with its branches crisscrossing each other in a tangle of soft white threads. Each neuron has a thousand or so junctions with other neurons, and some cells in the cerebral cortex have as many as sixty thousand. A gram of brain tissue may contain as many as 400 billion synapctic junctions, and the total quantity of connections in one brain rivals the numer of stars in the universe" (p. 48). The doctor hints at his knowledge of the potential of the brain in this excerpt, implying how little he or anyone really comprehends about its potential. 

The second instance comes much later in the book when he speaks on one of the numerous patients he remember having treated throughout his days in india. This one in particular, a fakir, had held his hand in the air for 15 years and was coming for treatment for a petic ulcer. "The best hand surgeon and therapist in the world could not reverse the damage done to his hand because of a simple mental choice" (p. 284). Here, Brand is again hinting at his knowledge of the minds potential to influence the body immensely and uses this example to explain this idea. 

Though I said before that there were only too worthwhile insights in the whole book, I stress that this was only my own opinion and that there a great many more "lessons" to be had about pain that can be found in the book. I must also add that is to some degree out of my unwillingness to expend a lot of energy in this book review that I don't enumerate on thos other stories from through out the book. But if there is anything that I think might have influenced my disinterest in the myriad of "pain stories" sprinkled throughout "The gift of pain" it is the fact that the majority of these stories are told from an objective viewpoint. It is hard to get past the fact that pain cannot be experienced objectively, and is a sensation that must be experienced. As a result, even the act of "reading" about pain is somewhat questionable. But to add to this predicament, the good doctor eloborates on the pain of others throughout the book, giving the reader not even a first hand, but a second hand account of another human's pain. Worthwhile? Maybe if you're studying medicine, but to the common reader, "The Gift of Pain" is a confused blob of short pain stories told from the perspective of the doctor who treated them. I am still unsure of exactly what the late Dr. Brand had to say about pain or even his life beyond the normal griping of most old people on the "pleasure seeking" nature of modern america, which is hard to take as it is.