ABSTRACT
Like emotions, pain lies at the intersection of mind and body, biology and culture. Medical theories of pain, however, have traditionally been dominated by its physiological aspects. This is clearly demonstrated by specificity theory, the basis of which was classically described in 1664 by Descartes, who proposed that a specific pain system carries messages from pain receptors in the skin to a pain centre in the brain. The location of the centre is thought to be contained in the thalamus and the cortex is assumed to exert an inhibitory control over it. Although there have been modifications and refinements with the emergence of physiology as an experimental science in the nineteenth century, the proposition none the less remains basically unchanged.
