The Connoisseur of Pain - The New York Times

Within minutes of our first meeting, and more or less in response to my saying good morning, Justin Schmidt began lamenting our culture ' s lack of insect-based rites of passage. He told me about the Sater é-Mawé people in northwestern Brazil, who hold a ceremony in which young men slip their hands into large mitts filled with bullet ants, whose stings are so agonizing they can cause temporary paralysis; when initiates pass the test, they ' re one step closer to becoming full members of society. Schmidt believes we could learn something from this. By trade, he is an entomologist, an expert on the Hymenoptera order — wasps, bees and ants — but his interest in this insect ritual was not merely academic. He has two teenage boys, and, on this particular morning at least, I found him wondering whether they might benefit from a pain ritual to help introduce them to adulthood." I mean, it wouldn ' t kill them, " Schmidt said. " And I think that may be the key to the whole thing: It can ' t kill you and yet something very real is happening. " It was a bit before 7:30 on a windy weekday morning in Tucson, and Schmidt had just dropped off his 14-year-old at school. At 69, Schmidt has a head of red hair that stubbornly refuses to go gray and a boyish face that glints of mischief. We were driving in his 1999 Toyota Corolla down a road that may have been a desert highway or a city thoroughfare: My East Coast eyes couldn ' t tell the difference. We pu...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Anesthesiology Source Type: blogs