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David B Morris

University of Virginia, English, Emeritus

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David Morris—writer and scholar—began his teaching career in 1969 at the University of Virginia. In 1982 he resigned a tenured full professorship at the University of Iowa in order to write full time. Twenty years later, after his wife, Ruth, fell ill, he rejoined the faculty at the University of Virginia in 2002 as University Professor: an appointment split between the Department of English and the School of Medicine. Retiring in 2007, he now lives and writes in Richmond, Virginia. His most recent book, published by Harvard University Press, is *Eros and Illness* (2017).

Morris has held multiple fellowships (Guggenheim, ACLS, NSF/NEH), editorial posts, honorary positions, and distinguished professorships. His earliest work in eighteenth-century British literature includes two prize-winning books—*The Religious Sublime* (1972) and *Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense* (1984). *The Culture of Pain* (1991), reflecting his turn toward the then-informal field of medical humanities, has been translated into several major languages and was awarded a prestigious PEN prize.

His work on pain led to invited lectures and writings for a variety of medical audiences, including a plenary address at the 10th annual World Congress on Pain. For example, he has chapters in *Narrative, Pain, and Suffering* (2005), which he co-edited with distinguished pain specialists Daniel Carr and John Loeser; in *Evidence-Based Chronic Pain Management* (2010); in the standard medical textbook *Bonica’s Management of Pain* (both 4th & 5th editions); and in the Springer *Handbook of Pain and Palliative Medicine*, which in its second edition will include a new essay (based on his experiences as caregiver) entitled “Pain at the End of Life.”

Other highlights? *Earth Warrior* (1995) tells the story of the voyage he took with environmental activist and Greenpeace co-founder Captain Paul Watson on an anti-driftnet mission in the North Pacific. In 2000 he co-founded and co-directed, with Dr. Julie Reichert, the annual, weeklong Taos Writing Retreat for Health Professionals—which has recently completed its eighteenth year. *Eros and Illness*, his latest book, might be viewed as the capstone of an unplanned biocultural trilogy that includes *The Culture of Pain* and *Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age*.

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Books by David B Morris

Sex, Pain and the Marquis de Sade

WANDERERS: Literature, Culture & the Open Road

Routledge

Civil War Duet, 2019

Newton Brown in 1862 enlists at eighteen in the 101st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. In *Civil War Due... more Newton Brown in 1862 enlists at eighteen in the 101st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. In *Civil War Duet* his 77-year-old great-grandson traces Newton's steps, braiding history and memoir in an original cross-century, trans-generational coming-of-age narrative. Newton Brown's wartime letters and dispatches inspire a parallel meditation in which writer-scholar David Morris (living where Confederate monuments generate ongoing racial strife) reflects on growing up amid political assassinations and the legacy of semi-blind white-supremacist racism.

Eros and Illness

Narrative, Pain, and Suffering

Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age

Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense

The Culture of Pain

The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England.

Papers by David B Morris

Introduction, *John Loeser: The Man Who Reimagined Pain*, by Jane Ballantyne

Springer Nature, 2023

Foreword to *Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account,* by Lous Heshusius. Ithaca: C... more

The Cloak and the Shield:A Thumbnail History of Palliation

Illness, Crisis, and Loss, 1998

The Infinite Faces of Pain: Narrative, Eros, and Ethics

Cultural Ontology of the Self in Pain, 2016

Ethics of Pain, Culture, and Ethnicity

Encyclopedia of Pain, 2013

Medical Eros: Caregivers, Loss, and an Ethics of Waiting

Literature and Medicine, 2014

Doctors tend to have a fierce commitment to the rational.. .. If there is a credo in practical me... more Doctors tend to have a fierce commitment to the rational.. .. If there is a credo in practical medicine, it is that the important thing is to be sensible.-Atul Gawande 1 Medical eros is the unfamiliar or invisible complement-and sometimes the outright antagonist-of the familiar evidence-based biomedical powers that gather, unofficially, under the sign of medical logos. The distinction between medical eros and medical logos, however unusual the terms, can prove useful in clarifying an ambiguous contemporary landscape where biomedicine with its sensible practices and rational procedures still rules supreme in its institutional settings-hospitals, laboratories, health systems, clinics, and grant agencies-despite sometimes effective, sustained challenges from competitors ranging from the biopsychosocial model, alternative and complementary medicine, integrative medicine, mind/body medicine, narrative medicine, holistic health, and cognitive-behavioral therapies all the way to local revivals of Ayurveda, herbal medicine, and shamanism. In its vast institutional power, biomedicine seems capable of absorbing almost any challenge so long as the challenger meets its standards of evidence and reason. In this sense, biomedicine represents less a monolithic or coherent philosophy than an attractive force that, like a massive health magnet, gathers together under the unseen sign of medical logos whatever practices it validates as rational, sensible, and securely evidence-based. Medical logos, in short, is biomedicine as practiced institutionally in the developed world with its amazing drugs, surgeries, gene therapies, and computerized diagnostic tools.

Narrative Medicines: Challenge and Resistance

A Poetry of Absence

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Ed. John Sitter, 2001

A poetics of absence appropriate to the eighteenth century would take as its distinctive image no... more A poetics of absence appropriate to the eighteenth century would take as its distinctive image not the void or abyss-where the rich material world encounters its opposite state of nothingness-but the ruin. Ruins are the trace of something that has vanished. As eighteenth-century poets employ the image, a ruin is less the sign of a distinct past, like the famous monument commemorating the London fire, than an evocation of something lost beyond recovery while nonetheless still persisting in fragments, remnants, and flashes of recollection. The ruin gives absence, so to speak, a material dwelling: a rock-solid site that, paradoxically, embodies a sense that the world is also porous, uncertain, and insubstantial. Its power in eighteenthcentury poetry derives from this implicit doubleness combining solidity with evanescence, like Rome as Piranesi depicted it in his Vedute di Roma (begun in the late 1740s), with shrubs sprouting from tumbledown classical arches, fallen statues beside overgrown temples, wooden shacks propped against the cenotaphs. John Dyer created his own version of this imagery in The Ruins of Rome (1740): the solemn scene Elates the soul, while now the rising sun Flames on the ruins in the purer air Tow'ring aloft, upon the glitt'ring plain, Like broken rocks, a vast circumference; Rent palaces, crush'd columns, rifled moles, Fanes roll'd on fanes, and tombs on buried tombs. 1

Sex, Pain and the Marquis de Sade

WANDERERS: Literature, Culture & the Open Road

Routledge

Civil War Duet, 2019

Newton Brown in 1862 enlists at eighteen in the 101st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. In *Civil War Due... more Newton Brown in 1862 enlists at eighteen in the 101st Ohio Volunteer Infantry. In *Civil War Duet* his 77-year-old great-grandson traces Newton's steps, braiding history and memoir in an original cross-century, trans-generational coming-of-age narrative. Newton Brown's wartime letters and dispatches inspire a parallel meditation in which writer-scholar David Morris (living where Confederate monuments generate ongoing racial strife) reflects on growing up amid political assassinations and the legacy of semi-blind white-supremacist racism.

Eros and Illness

Narrative, Pain, and Suffering

Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age

Alexander Pope: The Genius of Sense

The Culture of Pain

The Religious Sublime: Christian Poetry and Critical Tradition in 18th-Century England.

Introduction, *John Loeser: The Man Who Reimagined Pain*, by Jane Ballantyne

Springer Nature, 2023

Foreword to *Inside Chronic Pain: An Intimate and Critical Account,* by Lous Heshusius. Ithaca: C... more

The Cloak and the Shield:A Thumbnail History of Palliation

Illness, Crisis, and Loss, 1998

The Infinite Faces of Pain: Narrative, Eros, and Ethics

Cultural Ontology of the Self in Pain, 2016

Ethics of Pain, Culture, and Ethnicity

Encyclopedia of Pain, 2013

Medical Eros: Caregivers, Loss, and an Ethics of Waiting

Literature and Medicine, 2014

Doctors tend to have a fierce commitment to the rational.. .. If there is a credo in practical me... more Doctors tend to have a fierce commitment to the rational.. .. If there is a credo in practical medicine, it is that the important thing is to be sensible.-Atul Gawande 1 Medical eros is the unfamiliar or invisible complement-and sometimes the outright antagonist-of the familiar evidence-based biomedical powers that gather, unofficially, under the sign of medical logos. The distinction between medical eros and medical logos, however unusual the terms, can prove useful in clarifying an ambiguous contemporary landscape where biomedicine with its sensible practices and rational procedures still rules supreme in its institutional settings-hospitals, laboratories, health systems, clinics, and grant agencies-despite sometimes effective, sustained challenges from competitors ranging from the biopsychosocial model, alternative and complementary medicine, integrative medicine, mind/body medicine, narrative medicine, holistic health, and cognitive-behavioral therapies all the way to local revivals of Ayurveda, herbal medicine, and shamanism. In its vast institutional power, biomedicine seems capable of absorbing almost any challenge so long as the challenger meets its standards of evidence and reason. In this sense, biomedicine represents less a monolithic or coherent philosophy than an attractive force that, like a massive health magnet, gathers together under the unseen sign of medical logos whatever practices it validates as rational, sensible, and securely evidence-based. Medical logos, in short, is biomedicine as practiced institutionally in the developed world with its amazing drugs, surgeries, gene therapies, and computerized diagnostic tools.

Narrative Medicines: Challenge and Resistance

A Poetry of Absence

The Cambridge Companion to Eighteenth-Century Poetry. Ed. John Sitter, 2001

A poetics of absence appropriate to the eighteenth century would take as its distinctive image no... more A poetics of absence appropriate to the eighteenth century would take as its distinctive image not the void or abyss-where the rich material world encounters its opposite state of nothingness-but the ruin. Ruins are the trace of something that has vanished. As eighteenth-century poets employ the image, a ruin is less the sign of a distinct past, like the famous monument commemorating the London fire, than an evocation of something lost beyond recovery while nonetheless still persisting in fragments, remnants, and flashes of recollection. The ruin gives absence, so to speak, a material dwelling: a rock-solid site that, paradoxically, embodies a sense that the world is also porous, uncertain, and insubstantial. Its power in eighteenthcentury poetry derives from this implicit doubleness combining solidity with evanescence, like Rome as Piranesi depicted it in his Vedute di Roma (begun in the late 1740s), with shrubs sprouting from tumbledown classical arches, fallen statues beside overgrown temples, wooden shacks propped against the cenotaphs. John Dyer created his own version of this imagery in The Ruins of Rome (1740): the solemn scene Elates the soul, while now the rising sun Flames on the ruins in the purer air Tow'ring aloft, upon the glitt'ring plain, Like broken rocks, a vast circumference; Rent palaces, crush'd columns, rifled moles, Fanes roll'd on fanes, and tombs on buried tombs. 1

Pope and the arts of pleasure

Alexander Pope and the Arts of Pleasure "I never saw him laugh very heartily in all my life."-Mag... more Alexander Pope and the Arts of Pleasure "I never saw him laugh very heartily in all my life."-Magdalen Rackett, Pope's half-sister 1 Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads includes among its boldest claims-Lionel Trilling called it "bold to the point of being shocking"-an assertion that has gone almost unnoticed. "I refer," Trilling wrote, "to the sentence in which Wordsworth speaks of what he calls 'the grand elementary principle of pleasure,' and says of it that it constitutes 'the naked and native dignity of man,' that it is the principle by which man 'knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.'" 2 What proves most shocking is not simply Wordsworth's unambiguous and sweeping assertion that human dignity and knowledge take their origin in pleasure. Wordsworth's diction, as Trilling points out, echoes and controverts Saint Paul's declaration that "we live, and move, and have our being" in God (Acts 17:28). Augustan pleasure achieves a distinctive character that separates it from Romantic versions in which the aggrandizement of pleasure points ultimately towards an enraptured delight in which the boundaries of ego and of world temporarily dissolve. This is an extraordinary claim, especially-considering his popular reputation as the poet of reason and common sense-for Alexander Pope. Pleasure, as Pope says in a philosophical and theological language, is both the highest good and the greatest evil. It is plausible (although misguided) to imagine Pope as moralist asserting that pleasure is an evil. But our "greatest" evil? (Elsewhere, An Essay on Man follows the main tendency of Pope's work in describing the greatest danger to our moral life not pleasure but pride.) It is even harder to imagine Pope asserting that pleasure is our highest good. His unadorned couplet seems almost shockingly crude-as if it inviting a subtler elaboration that, at least in An Essay on Man, never truly arrives, leaving it to slip from view as if in a rush of paradoxical hyperbole. Pope's couplet escapes from meaningless hyperbole and paradox by a loophole. Pope assures us that the apparent paradox, like other mysteries in An Essay on Man, will unravel in plain sense when we know the differences between pleasure rightly understood and pleasure wrongly understood. This assurance, however, cannot resolve or entirely dissolve the questions which arise. Is pleasure wrongly understood still pleasure? What is a right understanding of pleasure? Why does Pope choose to define the boundaries of good and evil? His couplet typically withholds more meaning than it supplies, even as its implications extend far beyond An Essay on Man. In fact, from the stylized, amorous play of his pastoral lovers in "Spring" to the obscene epic games of The Dunciad, Pope depicts a social milieu in which pleasure-seeking is a consistent feature. It takes so many different forms that, like waking and sleeping, it can seem simply a basic human activity that tends to pass unnoticed, like waking and sleeping, although Pope assigns sleep and wakefulness with poetic significance.

Writing/Reading/Remembering: Dryden and the Poetics of Memory

"Transdermal Pain: A Sociocultural Perspective."

Optimal relief for pain at the end of life: a caregiver's tale

AbsTrACT The current opioid crisis—driven partly by medical overprescription and partly by illega... more AbsTrACT The current opioid crisis—driven partly by medical overprescription and partly by illegal drug abuse—is a significant cultural and professional dilemma in the USA and elsewhere. It has produced a strong reaction in favour of restricting medical use of opioids for pain, especially chronic pain. The author for a quarter century has written about pain from a biocultural perspective, and in this essay—based on his experience as primary caregiver for his late wife—he approaches the question of appropriate opioid use at the end of life.

Animal Pain.pdf

Editor's Introduction-- Environment: The White Noise of Health

Literature and Medicine, 1996

Morris argues that the major threat to human health is no longer a cataclysmic event but the ubiq... more Morris argues that the major threat to human health is no longer a cataclysmic event but the ubiquitous smaller threats from a deteriorating postmodern landscape. He uses Don DeLillo&#x27;s novel White Noise as a literary depiction of the dangers of the inherently unstable relations among humans, technology, and the natural world. He offers Richard Selzer&#x27;s Down From Troy as a valid critique of the inhumanity of modern hospitals. Morris calls for a rethinking of our priorities in which policy analysis and cost effectiveness currently drown out the pain experienced around the world.

Ruth C. Morris 1944 - 2016.docx

Obituary.

Medical Eros: Caregivers, Loss, and an Ethics of Waiting

Medical eros is the unfamiliar or invisible complement-and sometimes the outright antagonist-of t... more Medical eros is the unfamiliar or invisible complement-and sometimes the outright antagonist-of the familiar evidence-based biomedical powers that gather, unofficially, under the sign of medical logos. The distinction between medical eros and medical logos, however unusual the terms, can prove useful in clarifying an ambiguous contemporary landscape where biomedicine with its sensible practices and rational procedures still rules supreme in its institutional settings-hospitals, laboratories, health systems, clinics, and grant agencies-despite sometimes effective, sustained challenges from competitors ranging from the biopsychosocial model, alternative and complementary medicine, integrative medicine, mind/body medicine, narrative medicine, holistic health, and cognitive-behavioral therapies all the way to local revivals of Ayurveda, herbal medicine, and shamanism. In its vast institutional power, biomedicine seems capable of absorbing almost any challenge so long as the challenger meets its standards of evidence and reason. In this sense, biomedicine represents less a monolithic or coherent philosophy than an attractive force that, like a massive health magnet, gathers together under the unseen sign of medical logos whatever practices it validates as rational, sensible, and securely evidence-based. Medical logos, in short, is biomedicine as practiced institutionally in the developed world with its amazing drugs, surgeries, gene therapies, and computerized diagnostic tools.

Dark Ecology: Bio-anthropocentrism in *The Marriage of Heaven and Hell*

On Not-Knowing: Flute's Solo

The Black Swan of Pain

anekaant: a journal of polysemic thought, 2013

Pain is both personal and interpersonal. It is simultaneously subjective and intersubjective, bot... more Pain is both personal and interpersonal. It is simultaneously subjective and intersubjective, both political and psychological, shaped from the inescapable encounter with other persons and with the traces they have inscribed in language, in social structures, and in human culture. This interpersonal and intersubjective dimension of pain is important to emphasize precisely because it suggests a meaningful sense in which pain is not only familiar or well-known-as in everyday bruises or in the innumerable scientific studies published in pain journals-but also implacably strange and even unknowable. It hits us anew each time with an uncanny sense of recognition, as if in the repetition of some dimly recalled primal rite beyond or prior to language. This strange and unknowable dimension endows pain with an inseparable penumbra that almost requires referring to pain as an enigma. The enigma of pain, in effect, includes qualities that prove irreducible to paraphrase and resistant to an entirely objective analysis. It enfolds a range of psychic and emotional states that far exceed a biomedical calculus of tissue damage. Further, while we experience pain only in the semi-privacy of an individual subjective consciousness, it arises, persists, develops, and sometimes disappears always within the company and culture of other people, extending to family, friends, physicians, religions, ethnicities, and the changing historical circle of our social existence. What matters is to recognize and to account for this inherently enigmatic dimension of pain rather than seeking to deny, to expunge, or to demystify it. The enigmatic dimension inseparable from pain is intrinsic to its full reality.

The Patient's Side of Pain