Contents -- List of Illustrations -- Acknowledgments -- Chapter One: What Is Dolorology? -- Sentimentalism and Pain -- Pain and Biopolitics -- Pain and Speaking -- Chapters -- Chapter Two: Sublime Pain and the Subject of Sentimentalism -- Gendered Aesthetics -- Sublime Physiology -- Muscle Compassion -- The Racial Sublime -- Americanizing Pain -- Chapter Three: Anesthesia, Birthpain, and Civilization -- Medical Martyrs -- Anesthesia and the Medical Gaze -- The Pains of Reproduction -- Birthpain As Racial Relay -- Overcivilization and Self-Conduct -- From Women's Anesthesia to Feminist Eugenics -- Anesthesia and Democracy -- Chapter Four: Picturing Racial Pain -- Histories of the Back -- Gordon -- Peter -- Pain and Racial Memory -- White Pain and the Nation -- Biopolitical Portraits -- Margaret Garner's Necropolitics -- The Children of Louisiana -- Passing Over -- Theatrical Slavery -- National Protection -- Miscegenation Portrait -- Visual Dolorologies -- Chapter Five: Late Modern Pain -- Democratic Pornography -- Unscathed Life -- Notes -- Works Cited -- Index.