"The ancient rhetorical term kairos denotes the moment of opportunity for a particular sort of discursive intervention. Graham unfolds the 'synergy' between a contemporary biopsychosocial model in pain science and the turn in critical theory to new materialism and ontology, exposing both modernist and postmodernist explanatory fallacies. With remarkable theoretical agility, he gives us a thoroughly kairotic, pleasingly generative, and importantly interdisciplinary, approach to a wicked problem human beings have been contending with forever."

Judy Z. Segal, University of British Columbia

"Graham’s The Politics of Pain Medicine is an exemplary integration of rhetorical studies, science and technology studies, and material ontologies of human being.  With careful and textured analyses of research and medical efforts aimed at remediating the ineluctably interconnected biological, psychological, and social dimensions of pain, Graham both articulates and effects an ontological reorientation that has the potential to transform how theorists and practitioners think about pain, talk about pain, and respond to pain in others."

Samantha Frost, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

"The Politics of Pain Medicine, as a title, understates the comprehensive coverage of the complex topic of pain that can be found in this book's pages. Especially striking is Graham's deconstruction of the history of pain research into a variety of strands, each of which corresponds to a distinct mode of relating to the phenomena of pain. Even scholars who do not share Graham’s preoccupation with the role of rhetoric in the study of science and technology will come away with a more sophisticated understanding of why pain has been such a controversial and revealing site in the politics of medical practice. Moreover, fully aware of the closeness of pain to our sense of human dignity, Graham concludes the book with a sober reflection on what difference he thinks his inquiry can make to the future of pain as both an object of research and a personal experience."

Steve Fuller, University of Warwick