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A doctor's personal and unsparing account of how modern medicine's failure to understand pain has made care less effectiveInThe Song of Our Scars,physicianHaider Warraich offers a bold reexamination of the nature of pain, not as a simple physical sensation, but as a cultural experience.Warraich,himselfa sufferer of chronic pain,considers the ways our notions of pain have been shaped not just by science but by politics and power,bywhose suffering mattered and whose didn't.He weavesa provocative historyfrom theRenaissance, when paintransformed into a medical issue,throughthe racial legacy of pain tolerance,to the opiate epidemics of both thenineteenthandtwenty-firstcenturies, to the cutting edge of present-day pain science. Theconclusionis clear: only by reckoning with both pain'scomplicated historyanditsbiologycan today's doctors adequately treat their patients' suffering.