Pain Sensitivity: An Unnatural History from 1800 to 1965

Who was truly capable of experiencing pain? In this article, I explore ideas about the distribution of bodily sensitivity in patients from the early nineteenth century to 1965 in Anglo-American societies. While certain patients were regarded as “truly hurting,” other patients’ distress could be disparaged or not even registered as being “real pain.” Such judgments had major effects on regimes of pain-alleviation. Indeed, it took until the late twentieth century for the routine underestimation of the sufferings of certain groups of people to be deemed scandalous. Often the categorizations were contradictory. For instance, the humble status of workers and immigrants meant that they were said to be insensitive to noxious stimuli; the profound inferiority of these same patients meant that they were especially likely to respond with “exaggerated” sensitivity. How did physicians hold such positions simultaneously? Pain-assignation claimed to be based on natural hierarchical schemas, but the great Chain of Feeling was more fluid than it seemed

Patent nasopalatine ducts: an update of the literature and a series of new cases

PURPOSE The objective of this review is to present an update and summary of clinical findings of cases with a patent nasopalatine duct (NPD) reported in the literature from 1881 to 2016. METHODS Previous articles and reviews about patent NPDs were studied and copies of all original publications were obtained for data verification. Furthermore, a literature search was conducted. In addition, the study sample was complemented with four cases recently seen in our institution. RESULTS Ten out of 67 published cases were to be excluded for this analysis due to misinterpretation or misreporting in previous articles. Overall, 57 cases with NPD patency could be analyzed. Males outnumbered females in a ratio of 2:1. The mean age (when this information was available) was 34.1 ± 17.6 years (range 6-69 years). NPDs were located bilaterally (60%), unilaterally (20%) or centrally (20%). Complete or partial patency was reported in 73.9 and 26.1%, respectively. 74.1% of patients presented a variety of clinical signs and symptoms. The ability of the patient to produce a squeaky or whistling sound was the most frequent clinical finding (23.8%). CONCLUSIONS Caution must be exercised when reading review articles about NPD patency since wrong data have been copied in several subsequent publications. Since epidemiological data are missing with regard to patent NPDs, age and gender predilections are not warranted. Bilateral occurrence and full patency were prevailing features in the evaluated case reports of patent NPDs