Dr. Lin Po-Hsin's penetrating and original study is a major achievement.  This meticulous work of scholarship is path breaking: it opens up rich, diverse, nuanced, and often surprising worlds of medical thinking on the idea of pain in early China. In elucidating the idea of pain, its diagnosis, treatment, and experience, Dr. Lin draws widely on Chinese, Japanese, and English sources.  The author also draws on his own acute sensitivity to human suffering, borne of a decade-plus of treating patients in his practice of traditional Chinese medicine. The Conceptions of Pain is an enriching work of scholarship that will be read with great profit by historians of medicine and by readers across disciplines.”