Heal Me: In Search of a Cure by Julia Buckley, book review: An absolute must-read on the subject of chronic pain

The Independent's head of travel's deeply researched story of pain is insightful on both a spiritual and physical level

Read any of the epigraphs that head up each of the chapters in Julia Buckley’s truly fascinating memoir, Heal Me, and it’s a reminder that there’s a rich tradition of autobiographical accounts of illness and suffering. From Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Christina Rossetti, through Emily Dickinson and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, to Audre Lorde and Hilary Mantel, Buckley is only the latest in a long line of women who’ve put pen to paper to write about their pain.

That she identifies with these women who’ve come before her is important, for one of the struggles Buckley is up against is her gender – and thus a broader consideration of the relationship between gender politics and the medical gaze becomes a central concern of the book.

More than a century has passed since the protagonist of Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper spirals into actual psychosis after her physician husband diagnoses her with “hysteria”, but Buckley’s treatment at the hands of multiple male doctors who dismiss and belittle her pain has her invoking the 1892 novella in both desperation and anger.

Buckley is one of the unlucky third of the population who suffers from debilitating chronic pain. RSI is the GP’s diagnosis when she tells him it feels like her right arm is “on fire from the inside” and a carving knife is “lodged in her armpit”, and that her neck feels like it’s been flattened underneath a lorry. Oh that it were this straightforward. Her medical history is a complicated one, “girthy” in that her hospital file is bulging with consultations with different specialists. To list them here, along with the various diagnoses she’s received over the years, would take up too much space, but you get the picture. The first million-dollar question is whether her chronic pain is “a disorder in itself or merely a symptom of something else”? The second: Can it be cured?

Having had to give up her job, leave London (and her independence) and move back to Cornwall to live with her mother, it’s unsurprising that, as a travel journalist, she embarked on something of a round-the-world pilgrimage in search of a miracle.

In a “merry-go-round of taking chances,” she goes to Colorado for medical marijuana, experiments with terrifying vodou rituals in Haiti, seeks out a famous herbalist in a tiny mountain village in China, allows herself to be “serenaded by a celestial choir” in Joshua Tree, is immersed in the healing waters of Lourdes, and bathes in a mixture of chicken blood and her own vomit in Soweto.

Heal Me is both a searingly honest first-hand account of Buckley’s journey, both spiritual and physical, and an insightful, deeply researched story of pain from the multiple perspectives of medical science, psychology and faith. An absolute must-read on the subject, what’s laid bare here about our understanding of and attitudes to chronic pain is alternatively sobering and inflammatory.

‘Heal Me: In Search of a Cure’ by Julia Buckley is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, £16.99