Walking down a gleaming corridor of a modern hospital, glancing inside rooms filled with electronic equipment that seems to surround today's patients even after relatively minor treatments, it may be tempting to assume that the agonies that accompanied illness and trauma in the centuries past, are no longer a part of the experience of being ill, of having surgery, or of recovering from trauma. At least when access to modern health services is available, it may be reasonable to expect that we should no longer have to dread the pain that our ancestors would have known in similar circumstances. But pain is more than a scientific problem and modern science and technology can address only a part of the puzzle that experience of pain presents to patients, to clinicians¹ and to people generally.