Pinpricks: The Curiosity of Analgesia and Gate Control Theory (1950-1970)

• In Event: The Measure of an Organ: Epistemologies of Quantification and Bodily Visibility across Time and Space

Abstract

Acupuncture analgesia appeared relatively straightforward. The patient lay awake as a practitioner needled selected sites on the body to induce numbness for surgery. Numerous reports emerging from China in the 1970s featured men and women resting on operating tables, smiling into the camera, surrounded by doctors who attended to the excised region-the esophagus, brain, reproductive organs, heart, or lungs. Yet, readers were as amazed as they were skeptical. To one critic, acupuncture analgesia worked, but it only worked on Communist Chinese bodies. To others, it confirmed Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall's theory of gate control, in which a non-painful input blocked the experience of pain and its travel to the central nervous system. The dual appeal of analgesia induced by selective needling and visualizing potential paths at the periphery that "opened" and "closed" pain sensory receptors at in the spine invoked procedures that were equally hard to pin down. By drawing on approaches in postcolonial STS and history of medicine, this paper explores the life of analgesia and gate control theory as they came together in public display and private conversation. It makes use of unpublished drafts and correspondences to understand how individual encounters with a range of sensation competed with conceptions of numbness, a distinct sensation defined by the lack of sensation. I furthermore use these encounters to make sense of the personal, the political, and the social roles of numbness in the absence of the brain.

Author

• Lan A. Li, Rice University, Department of History, Medical Humanities Program