A reflective of The Pain Scale by Eula Biss - Essay Example

Teacher A reflection of “The Pain Scale” by Eula Biss Eula Biss article en d The Pain Scale is an interesting write because it attempted to measure pain by establishing a pain scale to reference pain so to speak. In the process of scaling or measuring pain, Bliss equated God with the number zero (probably because it is not in God’s nature to inflict pain) the absence of number 10 in her reference to Dante’s Inferno being the vortex of hell is only up to nine. Hell is even debated whether it exist or not or whether it is a physical place or plainly imaginary.

In the end, Bliss gave up with the idea of establishing a measurement scale or a pain scale because she realize that there is really no such thing as absolute especially when it comes to pain. Bliss article was a wonderful literary excursion to articulate the nature of pain but she did not have to go such length had she just been keen with how people deal with pain and distress than study Dante’s Inferno in her quest to understand pain. Her synthesis also that it is virtually impossible to measure pain could not have been lengthy had she observed that pain is relative to people and its triggers are virtually countless.

Being such, the examples that would show how relative is pain is abundant. We need not go further to cite examples. We can cite our study. There are students who would be devastated to get a failing or a lower grade while there are students who would just shrug it off and just try to study harder next time. There are people who are daunted by failure and are immensely distressed by it while there are people who take pain in stride and instead measure their true success from their ability to recover from failure.

Biss associated pain to religion and to be specific, to Christian perspective of religion which for me is a limited attempt to establish a reference to understand pain. It is limited because pain is universal albeit how we feel it varies in degree and what causes it is relative and the yardstick she attempted to use are prejudiced. For example, Dante’s Inferno is a brilliant literary masterpiece as referenced in the article The Pain Scale but it cannot be inferred to in measuring pain as something universal that could cover every human being.

For all we know, Dante’s Inferno is Christian in orientation because in it Prophet Muhammad was referred to as false prophet and therefore to be placed in the vortex of hell and to use to quantify the pain of Mohammedans or Muslims is quite offensive. God is also associated to the number zero and this must be the Christian God because in the article Christians were used as a reference that hell exists. Hell in Biss work is important because it is associated with pain. She however missed other groups of people because other people do not believe nor have any concept of hell such as the Buddhist or Hindu.

In sum, Eula Biss article entitled The Pain Scale lacked perspective and it is no wonder why she failed to measure pain not because of the inherent relativity of pain but because of her limited and insensitive approach to articulate the subject.