Opinion: What Philip Roth’s ‘The Anatomy Lesson’ can teach us about pain and addiction
We all could use greater insight on pain and addiction. I found it in a Philip Roth novel.
Pain, which lodges at the heart of the opioid crisis, is baffling. We struggle to describe, understand, and treat it. To endure it. Which is why FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb convened last week a group of people suffering from chronic pain. He wanted to hear their stories. I imagine that it was instructive for Gottlieb to encounter some raw, intimate narratives of suffering in this “patient-focused drug development” meeting.
Philip Roth, the legendary novelist who died on May, would have understood Gottlieb’s intentions. “[P]ain could make you awfully primitive if not counteracted by steady, regular doses of philosophical thinking,” he wrote in “The Anatomy Lesson,” his classic 1983 novel.
