Description: Examining migraines in children and the socially disabling effects that chronic pain can have, this book uses medical, political and cultural discourse to convey a sense of invisible disability in child migraine sufferers and its subsequent oppression within hegemonic educational and medical policy. Interviews and testimonials from a range of historical, literary, and medical sources are analysed in a child-centred context, along with representations of child pain within literature, art and popular culture. The book will appeal to scholars in childhood studies, children's rights, literary and visual culture, disability studies and medical humanities.
Review Quotes:
'The Western contemporary ethos confers innocence and nostalgia on childhood, a tendency that too often belittles, denies or oversimplifies the suffering that real children experience. Young sufferers from migraine are consummate examples of this dilemma, as Susan Honeyman documents well in Child Pain, Migraine and Invisible Disability. Health care providers, who generally ask children to report pain using a reductionist single answer on a pain scale, would do well to consider Honeyman's complex, humane account (including first-person narratives).'--Cindy Dell Clark, Rutgers University, U.S.A
"I cannot write a dispassionate review of this book. I read sections of this book aloud to my partner, who was my companion through twelve years of migraine. I wept in recognition and fulminated on behalf of my fellow migraineurs. I became intensely angry on behalf of today's child migraineurs for whom not only many things not have become better, but for whom modern ideologies of education have created an increasingly hostile environment. This book needs to be in paperback and Kindle, and a copy needs to be handed to every medical student and teacher." --Farah Mendlesohn, The Lion and the Unicorn