"Although pain is a universal human experience, many view the pain of others as private, resistant to language, and, therefore, essentially unknowable. And, yet, despite the obvious limits to comprehending another's internal state, language is all that we have to translate pain from the solitary and unknowable to a phenomenon richly described in literature, medicine, and everyday life. Without denying the private dimensions of pain, All in Your Head...

"One evening, while completing his medical training in Pakistan, Haider Warraich went to the hospital gym to work out. He was in the middle of a set when he heard the sound of a loud click in his back. His body went limp, the weight held above his chest came crashing down, and Haider was rushed into the hospital, now suddenly a patient where just a few hours earlier he had been a doctor. A decade later, Warraich is now an internist in Boston, and...