ABSTRACT
This chapter pursues the entanglement of intellectual and experiential history when considering pain through the lens of the emotions history. It establishes and justifies a theoretical approach to the study of the history of pain, predicated on social neuroscientific research that connects situated conceptual repertoires to the shape of experience. It then explores more fully the relation between knowledge about pain and the way pain is expressed, thereafter turning to the historicisation of how people bear witness to the other in pain. This takes us much closer to the politics that inhere in pain concepts and to a biocultural understanding of not only what pain experiences are, but also how they come to change over time.
