My friend Lila pointed me to
Irukandji syndrome. From the article:
The severity of the pain from an Irukandji jellyfish sting is apparent in the 2005 Discovery Channel documentary Killer Jellyfish[20] about Carukia barnesi, when two Australian researchers (Jamie Seymour and Teresa Carrette) are stung. Even under the "maximum dose of morphine", Teresa remarked she "wished she could rip her skin off", and is later seen writhing uncontrollably from the pain while lying on her hospital bed. [...] Jamie said he wished that he was stung by Chironex fleckeri, instead, since "the pain goes away in 20 minutes or you die".
On the television program Super Animal, a woman compared her pain from childbirth to her experience with Irukandji syndrome: "It's like when you're in labor, having a baby, and you've reached the peak of a contraction—that absolute peak—and you feel like you just can't do it anymore. That's the minimum that [Irukandji] pain is at, and it just builds from there."
Readers may be familiar with
my quotation from Orwell:
Never, for any reason on earth, could you wish for an increase of pain. Of pain you could wish only one thing: that it should stop. Nothing in the world was so bad as physical pain. In the face of pain there are no heroes, no heroes [...].
In fact, another friend of mine recently added this to her Favorite Quotations on Facebook. However, that passage has sometimes been criticized for use of the phrase "physical pain." For one thing,
pain doesn't always feel bad, and for another thing, physical pain may not be the worst form. Both of these complaints are cavils in my opinion because they don't change what Orwell was trying to say. Of course he meant the "bad kind" of pain when he said "pain," and the distinction between "physical" and "mental" pain is fuzzy and ultimately unimportant.
That said, it remains an interesting question to ask whether, for the range of possible pains that people can experience in the world, physical or mental pain is worse. I often hear people say that mental pain is worse, and in my own life, that's probably true, but I think this says more about the conditions in which I live than it does about possible magnitudes of pain for the human nervous system. We in rich countries basically don't have much physical pain, until we develop an ailment or break a leg or undergo childbirth, but we still have plenty of anxiety, depression, social conflict, etc. But if you actually experienced the full magnitudes of possible pain, I'm pretty sure the physical sort would be much worse. I would rather be depressed for months or years rather than burn at the stake for one minute. I haven't experienced Irukandji, but maybe I would feel similarly about that. Some things are just so bad they make everything else seem trivial. Indeed, those lesser pains and pleasures are almost trivial by comparison, and it takes prodigious durations of them to outweigh the severity of the worst experiences.
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