Try not to think about martyrs. This is what K. argues for in his book focusing on pain in the Imperial period. Looking at a range of texts across different fields, K. shows that pain was a topic of interest in Imperial culture more generally and that Christians were not the only ones with interesting things to say about it in the first three centuries of our era. To support his argument, he draws on a wide range of genres in three parts. The first part investigates medical works that connect pain to the problem of diagnosis. The next two parts draw out how these physiological views about the body are elaborated and changed in genres beyond the medical, such as rhetoric, drama and philosophy: Part 2 focuses on the experience of pained individuals, and Part 3 deals with the experience of observers of pained individuals. Throughout these sections K. traces three major themes. The first is what he calls the development and influence of the ‘anatomico-aesthetic model’ of the body, which he argues is at the root of what is distinctive in thinking about pain in the Imperial period. The second is the complicated relationship between pain and language, and the third is the affective relationships that are forged and changed via experiencing, seeing and speaking about pain. His introduction provides a helpful overview of modern concerns that impinge on these themes.

K. begins with the medical literature to argue that a new understanding of the body came to prominence in the Imperial period due to rational medicine's interest in anatomy. He pursues this investigation by looking at the work of two Imperial writers, Aretaeus of Cappadocia and Galen of Pergamum. Diagnosis for both of these medical practitioners involved a correct understanding of the anatomy of the body, but just as much it involved communication with the sufferer. The language of pain negotiates complex power dynamics, and K. investigates why both choose to represent themselves as learning from patients. He answers that granting patients a voice is always at the service of the self-definition of the doctor, although the type of self-definition varies between them. Aretaeus is happy to make diagnosis a balanced relationship between the information provided by the patient and that provided by the doctor. Galen, on the other hand, wishes to show beyond a doubt that he alone has true knowledge about the state of health. While Aretaeus sympathised with his patients, Galen thinks that they are unable to communicate properly, and that he must therefore do it for them. But whether the relationship is combative or collaborative, the pain experience forms and affects relationships.

In Part 2 K. turns from medical literature to a wider array of literary products that include reflections on pain: Lucian's para-tragedy Podagra, Plutarch's dialogue That It Is Not Possible to Live According To Epikouros and Aelius Aristides’ Sacred Tales. Although produced in a context where medical anatomy was a prevalent way of viewing the body and pain, these texts also show frequent interference with literary allusions to pain. K. draws out four examples of how literary works negotiate pain differently from the medical texts looked at in Part 1. In the first place, they often use heroic examples such as Odysseus and Philoctetes to figure the endurance of pain. Second, their pain-language is influenced by genre restrictions. This leads to the third consideration that genre clichés often distance the reader from the experience of pain. Finally, there are various religious aspects of pain that come to the fore, especially in Aelius Aristides. But because K. does not directly compare how these texts treat pain differently to texts of preceding centuries, it is hard to see how these texts reflect a distinctly Imperial understanding of the body in pain, especially since most of them do not interact directly with the anatomical model. However, K. has illuminating things to say about the link between pain and language in this section. For instance, in his investigation into Lucian's Podagra, he shows that Gout is a perfect rhetorical teacher – of the scream and groan (p. 127). Likewise, he argues that Aelius Aristides shows how pain confounds the ability to provide clear narration, a fact which true eloquence recognises (p. 140).

Part 3 turns to descriptions of pained individuals in non-medical works, which strive to make present in the mind of the reader the pained individual through ekphrasis. As K. explores, the responses to ‘seeing’ pain differ not only in the range of emotions evinced (desire/eros and pity being the two strongest), but also in the range of interference run through ‘clichés’ or genre-markings, such as tragic or novelistic tropes. This section also encourages us as recipients of these ekphrases to examine how we respond to Classical pain. K. starts with the straightforward ekphrastic Imagines of Philostratus, then turns to Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Cleitophon (which has often been read with ekphrasis in mind) and concludes with a well-chosen look at Plutarch's On Flesh-Eating, which examines the negative consequences of habitually viewing violence.

There seem to have been a few minor glitches in the process of revising. For example, p. 103 retains mention of an earlier structure where what are now parts were once longish chapters, which also explains the presence of concluding ‘stump’ chapters of about four pages each, apparently the original conclusions to these longer chapters. At another point, K. starts off by explaining ‘three’ implications of an argument, but follows through with an in-depth description of four, adding the theme of language (pp. 110–14). But these are, of course, only minor distractions from the overall argument.

K.’s efforts to draw together texts dealing with pain from a wide variety of genres is to be commended. But the very characteristic that makes this book interesting is the same one that makes it difficult to carry off. In order to link together the variety of texts he has chosen to focus on, K. argues that there was something shared among all these texts. However, once he has taken away the contrast with Christian ideas of pain being developed at the same time, the unity of the group of non-Christian texts suffers. For example, although K. wishes to argue that an anatomical view of the body undergirds the texts he focuses on, most of the texts that he looks at in Parts 2 and 3 do not seem to interact with the anatomical view of the body in any significant way. K. never quite convinced me that non-Christian Imperial texts care more about pain or differently about pain than, say, Classical texts, where pain was of deep concern to writers of tragedy and history, for instance. In the end, I was left still wondering what was Imperial about these experiences of pain.

The second two themes that K. follows seem much more persuasive. How can pain, which so often results in non-discursive cries, be communicated, and what type of community does such communication create? K. is at his best when he focuses on these issues, and in all his chapters, he presents interesting close readings that give insight into the ‘pain-language nexus’, as he calls it. Wide-ranging and situated as an important contribution to the burgeoning field of medical humanities, this volume explores the manifold relationships that are created around pained individuals, which also includes us as readers of Classical pain.