Picturing Pain

What does pain look like? Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) includes a well-known list of the visible and physiological signs of pain. Published a year after The Descent of Man, it sets out to show that the human face is the product not of divine fashioning, but of descent with modification. Joy, melancholy, fear, disgust, contempt, anguish: for Darwin, the body language of human emotion – and pain – provides compelling evidence for evolution, and his account of pain appropriately begins in the animal kingdom. There are some major obstacles to the study of emotional expression, however. The facial movements involved, notes Darwin, are often ‘extremely slight, and of a fleeting nature’.