The language of pain, stretching back to antiquity, conflated the emotional and the physical. The overlap of grief, anguish, despair and sorrow with physical pain lies at the heart of vernacular expressions of suffering in Ancient Greek, Latin, Arabic, Urdu, Hindi and Chinese, as well as in English and other European languages. For thousands of years, the statement ‘I am in pain’ was an emotional as well as a physical claim. While this semantic overlap seems consistent, the precise conceptualisation has varied enormously, from ὀδύvη (odúnē, Ancient Greek) to dolor (Latin), to wajaʿ (Arabic), to dard (Farsi, Hindi and Urdu), to tòng (Chinese). Moreover, there is a rich history of the iconography of the ineffable: representations of pain that, while it could not be uttered, was nonetheless expressed. By documenting the historically situated processes of experiencing and expressing types of pain, it is possible to show both an enormous variety while insisting upon a long history of the braiding of the emotional and the physical. This has the effect, in turn, of implicitly de-naturalising and situating present-day experiences of pain and of disrupting two centuries of modern medical expertise.
