Breaking through the pain barrier. The extraordinary life of Dr Michael J. Cousins

Abstract

This is a creative, practice-led thesis comprising a biography as the creative component and an exegesis as the theoretical element. The biography, ‘Breaking through the Pain Barrier: The Extraordinary Life of Dr Michael J. Cousins’, shares the life story of Dr Michael Cousins, Australia’s pre-eminent pain medicine pioneer. During the second half of the twentieth century, when pain was still viewed as a ‘dead-end’ area of medicine, Cousins inspired and led teams of equally dedicated colleagues to build the field of pain medicine in Australia.

An earlier iteration of the biography was published as a book in 2021; however, the biography presented for examination is a completely rewritten version based on new evidence from archives that were closed during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

This exegesis, ‘Choices, Choices, Choices: One Biographer’s Experience’, explores the multiplicity of choices I made while researching, drafting, publishing and rewriting the biography. The first chapter considers how my choices were influenced by the complexity of scientific and medical research and the imperative to translate it into a captivating narrative for the general reader. Chapter Two examines the decisions I made while striving to balance Cousins’s human story with his scientific and public lives, and Chapter Three considers how I navigated the perils of writing about a living subject, including privacy, moral and ethical concerns. Chapter Four analyses my choices about authorial voice, plot, structure, the use of novelistic devices, interpretation and other aspects of narrative strategy. And Chapter Five reflects on my experiences and learnings as I rewrote the published manuscript based on new evidence.

In this thesis, ‘Choices, Choices, Choices’ is presented first to provide theoretical, background and contextual information. The biography ‘Breaking through the Pain Barrier’ is presented after the exegesis (Part II).