getting emotional

My research is (broadly) into the way eighteenth-century Methodists constructed the experience of suffering. It continually brings me into contact with stories that both horrify and perplex. This is one of them:

In July 1758 Charles Wesley, Methodist preacher and poet, was sent a description of a mastectomy recently performed upon a Methodist laywoman. The description, entitled 'An account of Mrs Davis behaviour during the operation of her breast being cut out', was written by a woman who had been present during the operation. She wrote of Mrs Davis,

'While the inside of her breast was taken out she ask'd, if they had done cutting: I answer'd yes, and some thread being call'd for, she immediately said there is some in my work basket on the table: while they sew'd up the blood vessel, she said this pain is very great, she call'd on the lord to strengthen her and said I'm faint, and while she was going to receive some drops from the hands of a friend: I fainted away.'

For me, even the thought of the pain that Mrs Davis must have experienced is almost unbearable. This terse account and the emotional response is engenders raises an immediate question: how did eighteenth-century men and women endure suffering such as this? This is, in some ways, the central question that drives my research. But there are other equally interesting questions that this story raises. Later in this account the writer professes herself unable to understand why she fainted given that throughout the operation, she was at peace and 'entirely happy'. Her self-perception points to one of the many problems that the historian of emotions encounters. I struggle to believe that anyone could be 'entirely happy' while watching a friend suffer under the knife. But my struggle (and my immediate reading of her collapse as a physical response to unimaginable stress) is not necessarily a guide to the 'truth' of her emotional state, unless you believe that Freud's theories represent absolutes. Is it, in fact, possible or desirable to access such a 'truth' when reading about the experience of someone in the past? To put it more broadly, to what extent are emotions universal and to what extent are they socially constructed?

These are the kind of questions I'm reflecting on as I try to collect my thoughts on emotion for an article I'm planning to write. I still have a way to go before I'm coherent! Historians of emotion have considered these questions in more theoretical terms - I want to consider how they apply to the history of suffering in particular. Eighteenth-century Methodists conceptualised suffering in ways that modern historians have dismissed (or psychoanalysed) as unhealthy or unbelievable. I'd like to suggest that we take them more seriously on their own terms. But I also want to hold to my conviction that not everything is socially constructed - that we can identify with, sympathise with, understand other human beings across centuries as well as across distances, races, classes.