ABSTRACT
The study of historical attitudes towards pain is a very new field, related to the focus upon the human body as an important part of human life in the past.1 Most of the work done has been informed by modern perceptions of pain that saw it as an opponent, to be vanquished. Until little over a century ago, the existence of pain was accepted as a given. It could, if necessary, be eased by various means, but nobody saw any reason to try and eradicate it in any and all pain situations. It was not until the middle of the nineteenth century that pain, like microbes, came to be constructed as a disease that ought to be eradicated and perceived as evil by definition. Before, what one could do when faced with pain – if one was properly inculcated in the expected modes of behaviour – was to react according to the required norms governing the person and situation. Perhaps the greatest revolution in Western attitudes towards pain is the transition from attempts at controlling behaviour to attempts at controlling sensation.
