2.2 Relevance to the Human Experience
The concept of animal pain and its treatment has been based extensively on the
human experience in the absence of verbal communication. However, the extension
of evaluating pain in non-verbal humans has shown some interesting comparisons
with the veterinary experience. Non-verbal humans fall broadly into three groups,
the pre-verbal communication group, i.e. the very young, the non-communicative
impaired group i.e. the severely mentally challenged and the non-communicative
aged group i.e. sufferers from conditions such as strokes and dementias, a group
which has increased significantly in numbers over the recent years. The evaluation
and treatment of pain in these groups is often based on similar criteria to those used
in veterinary species, such as behavioural responses, physiological responses and
responses to analgesic therapy. Reviews of these areas have been published that
provide many interesting insights into the development of treatment (Findlay and
McGrath 1998 ; Gibson and Weiner 2005 ).
One interesting aspect that has arisen as a result of studies in humans is the
association between memory and pain. While it is clear that people cannot recall
the actual pain experienced, they can normally recall the circumstances and
emotions involved. This was most lucidly documented by one Professor Wilson
who had had his foot amputated at the ankle joint by James Syme, a well-known
surgeon in the early nineteenth century,without the benefit of anaesthesia or
analgesia. As documented by Graham ( 1956 ), he wrote “The operation was a
more tedious one than some which requiremuch greater mutilation. It necessi-
tated much more cutting through inflamed and morbidly sensitive parts, and
could not be despatched by a few strokes of the knife. I do not suppose that it
was more painful than the majority of severe surgical operations are, but I am not,
I believe, mistaken in thinking it was not less painful, and this is all that I wish to
contend for of the agony it occasioned I will say nothing. Suffering so great as I
underwent cannot be expressed in words and thus fortunately cannot be recalled.
The particular pangs are now forgotten, but the black whirlwind of emotion, the
horror of great darkness and sense of desertion by God and man, bordering close
on despair, which swept through my mind and overwhelmed my heart, I can
never forget however gladly I would do so. During the operation, in spite of the
pain it occasioned, my senses were preternaturally acute, as I have been told they
are in patients, in such circumstances. I still recall with unwelcome vividness the
spreading out of the instruments, the twisting of the tourniquet, the first incision,
the fingering of the sawed bone, the sponge pressed on the flap, the tying of the
blood vessels, the stitching of the skin, and the bloody dismembered limb lying
on the floor ...”.
Anyone who reads this cannot doubt the emotional involvement associated with
unalleviated pain. This brings us back to the question posed by Jeremy Bentham,
also in the early nineteenth century, regarding animals and pain “the question is
not can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer?” (Bowring 1962 ). Thus,
the concept of pain and suffering are linked and because they are regarded as
162 A. Livingston