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Opiate addiction and the history of pain and race in the US

  • Written by Joseph M. Gabriel, Associate Professor of History and Social Medicine, Florida State University
Opiate addiction and the history of pain and race in the USPain of the sick: 'Anatomy of Expression,' by Sir Charles Bell, 1806.Wellcome Collection, CC BY

“I have had little or no sleep, owing to the tooth ache or rather stump ache,” Elizabeth Drinker wrote in her diary one night in 1796. “One of my Eye teeth very sore, my face much swelled and painful.”

Drinker, a white woman from...

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