ABSTRACT
This chapter begins the task of explaining the critical importance of the history of pain in American society by examining one particular phenomenon in the mid- to late nineteenth century: attitudes, practices, and beliefs of pioneering American neurologists towards patients' experiences of pain without lesion. It develops a supporting claim: attempting to understand the meanings of pain without thinking about the history of pain is like studying a leaf without awareness of the tree to which it belongs. The central claim is that leading neurologists of the time generally denied the possibility that pain could exist in the absence of material lesion. The emphasis on the illness sufferer's lifeworld, on a holistic notion of the interplay between subject and illness, is also evident in humoral understandings of pain. The key point in the humoral conception of pain was the fundamental enmeshment of 'physical' and 'emotional' pain, of mind, body, and soul.
