The Mystery Of Pain

Wellcomecollection - The Mystery Of Pain

James Hinton was an ear surgeon who was best known for The Mystery of Pain, a little book which sets forth the Panglossian thesis that "all that which we feel as painful is really giving-something that our fellows are better for, even though we cannot trace it." It gives some idea of the turn of the son Charles Hinton's mind to learn that he wrote a piece, "The Persian King," in which he attempted to use higher dimensions and infinite series to obtain a mathematically accurate model of this idea.