The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch

The Uses of Pain

60 chapter three by the mid-sixteenth century, but reappearing in subsequent centuries in times of social stress (Hecker 1970; Midelfort 1999: 32–49). Along with the dancing mania were three other premodern dance-related phenomena:St.Anthony’s Fire,Tarantism,and the Danse Macabre.St.Anthony’s Fire (erysipelas), named after the saint whom sufferers invoked for relief, was a disease predominantly caused by eating bread made with rye infected by a poisonous fungus. It reddened the skin and produced a sensation of burning heat, hence its characterization as fire. (A woodcut of 1504 by Hans Weiditz shows a sufferer from the disease coming to Saint Anthony with his hands literally on fire.) It could also cause hallucinations, convulsions, and wild behavior, and thus may have been a contributing factor in some of the occurrences of dancing mania. (Another disease that may have contributed to the dancing mania was Sydenham’s chorea,which causes jerking movements.) St.Anthony’s fire was much feared for, not only was it intensely painful, it could result in the loss of limbs and death. In fact, a popular curse in the MiddleAges was “may St.Anthony’s fire burn you!” Tarantism was a dancing fit that first manifested itself in fourteenth-century Italy and was believed to be caused by the bite of the tarantula. Some sufferers found that being rocked in a cradle or swing allayed the irritability caused by tarantism; others relied on beatings—but most found their only relief in dancing .A particular style of lively folk song, called the tarantella, was the music of preference for this purpose and bands of musicians would traverse Italy to play therapeutic tarantellas for their dancing patients. The Danse Macabre or Dance of Death appeared for the first time in the early fifteenth century in Paris,though it was suggestive of old folk practices that used dance as a form of mourning the dead. Rather than an actual dance the Danse Macabre was a pictorial and literary theme expressing the power of death over the living. Pictures of the Danse Macabre show the skeletal figure of Death leading a chain of dancers—young and old,rich and poor,noble and common—into the grave.This image would have expressed a perception, which must have been common in those traumatic times, of being whirled away to one’s death, ready or not. Literary expositions of the theme warned people not to be “harde-hettid as a stone” but to correct their ways before Death came to take them too by the hand (Pearsall 1999: 354). The Uses of Pain Pain and illness have clearly been a profound and often unavoidable part of human experience for most of history.However,if people could not hope to master pain in the centuries before the development of modern medicine,they could and did become masters of the uses of pain. And the uses of pain were many: instrucClassen_Text .indd 60 3/15/12 2:48 PM PainfulTimes 61 tion,discipline,domination,exorcism,purification,redemption,transcendence, subversion, stimulation, diversion, punishment, and deterrence, among others. The common motif of the schoolmaster striking a pupil exemplifies the instructional and disciplinary role of pain.This role extended outside the schoolroom to encompass a good part of social life. Parents used pain to instruct and discipline their children. Masters used it to control their serfs, servants, and apprentices. Husbands might inflict pain on their wives for similar reasons,and wives,though in contravention of the social norms,sometimes did the same with their husbands (i.e., Kettle 1995: 25). As in the schoolroom, the infliction of pain was ideally intended to make a lesson—whether it concerned intellectual attainments or good behavior— memorable.Another motive for a beating might be to drive out the demons held to be causing disruptive or mad behavior in an individual (Woolgar 2006: 37). This does not mean, however, that beatings were always informed by such intentions nor that pain was always meted out in just measure. Many a child or wife or servant would have endured severe beatings at the hands of their correctors, and in many cases, a beating would have been prompted more by a fit of anger, a desire for self-assertion—or perhaps mere habit—than by any explicit intention to instruct or exorcise. In theory, excessive beatings were out of line and even illegal: conventional morality decreed that one should only strike an “inferior” with moderate force “in order to train...