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If we want to take care of pain, we have to understand the signs of pain as being part of a particular experience, with a particular meaning and a particular history. In "The Body in Pain", Elaine Scarry writes that pain not only resists language, but actively destroys it. Pain is often the reason for visiting a doctor; yet, at the same time, the difficulties of articulating pain means it can become the source of misunderstanding between patient and doctor, influencing the whole process of anamnesis, diagnosis, and therapy. New categories of pain, described via poetic and pictorial means, may facilitate conversation about pain and help patients to express her/his pain more adequately. These categories might also extend the perspective of the doctor who is informed with — and therefore limited by — the abstract clinical terminology of her/his medical training, this being a possible cause of her/his separation from the existential dimension of pain. Over the course of this project, rich, multidimensional, and multimedia pain descriptions are attempted and organised into new categories. The sources for these new categories are to be found in literature (fiction and non-fiction), poetry, and personal experience.
