ABSTRACT
Suffering has physical, psychological, legal, and ethical dimensions. Biology and culture both affect an individual’s and society’s response to injury or harm. Narrative is the most important component of pain expression. Pain medicine arose during the last half of the twentieth century and accompanied the rise of new clinics and treatment centers devoted specifically to pain. The English word “pain” refers to innumerable different experiences linked together not by a common essence but by what philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein calls “family resemblances”. The multiplicity of pain and suffering has no clear limit because our brains situate within an open-ended matrix of biology and culture. Human pain is always a biocultural condition – a composite experience requiring biology of brain states and of neural processes negotiated within a social space where individuals interact with the surrounding culture, including the culture of medicine.
