SUMMARY The understanding of experienced pain has recently moved from the biological to the metaphorical. Detailed interviews with twelve Turkish and Kurdish patients in London who had been unsuccessfully investigated medically for chronic pain showed that their understanding reflected local, typically humoural, conceptions of self and body. However there was little to suggest interpretation of the illness as a more specific and grounded idiom for social or political experience. It is suggested that the current …showed first 75 words of 743 total…

…showed last 75 words of 743 total…a social institution, capitalism, an argument which would presumably have been unintelligible to the early Protestants themselves.) And if the latter, what are the limits of plausibility within a particular discipline? To interpret an illness as representative of its culture in the second sense presumably requires both some temporal relationship of social events or structure to illness, as well as some sort of formal and logical similarity between illness and a particular individual experience (Littlewood, 1997)