A survey of the types of, and the history of, pain, pain treatment, pain management and - well - pain enjoyment. What I liked about Ouch! was that it takes its position as a personally authored book from the start of the introduction. Here are our two authors, get to know them by name (and their personal history of pain), because they will be referring to themselves, and to their own dialogues about pain a lot. They will also be doing jokes (Mom jokes) which admittedly don't always land, but maintain that personal feel. This is not that unusual in popular science, it is a way of humanising the subject and showing the research as a journey, but feels particularly well done here potentially because pain and our choices how to manage and mismanage our own pain are very personal. This is friendlier and more discursive say than the most similar book I have read recently - The Rag And Bone Shop - on memory, written by a a doctor with clinical case studies - the personal aspect pulls in the secondary theme in the book. Ouch! is not a self help book, but aspects of it can certainly be seen that way. We start with the neurological basis of physical pain, what happens to body receptors and in the brain, before a more epistemological view takes over. Physical pain is emotional pain, the actual suggest here is that pain is in itself an emotion, and our fear of it, and wanting to dull it is sometimes not the best way to deal with it. The book has plenty of caveats, not least in its dive into the opiod crisis, but there is a general suggestion that pharmacological pain suppression is just a small part of the approaches and responses to pain. Also as an emotion, and something that ties body and brain together (though we need to avoid dualism), issues around chronic pain, and the ability to truly empathise with the pain of others makes everything difficult. Which is before you get on to the gleeful chapter on BDSM and the kid gloves it has when talking about self inflicted pain for other psychological reasons. It does throw Jane Fonda a bit too much shade for her "no pain no gain" workout slogan, but that is pretty much the subtext of much of the book. Ouch! is a thorough and fun discussion on pain with a serious subtext which is that we all have to learn to live with pain. That could be physical pain, it could be emotional pain, trauma sadly is the greatest precipitant to personal growth (because it forces change). That most of us have origin stories that involved surviving pain, or the adversity that comes with it - I'll proudly show off the scar from where the top of my finger was sliced off by a toy shop door and it is my first "memory" and my go to "I was a brave child" story. Ouch! made me understand why.