This book is an updated Hebrew translation of The Modulated Scream: Pain in Late Medieval Culture . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. The subject of this book is human pain in the later middle ages (13th - 15th centuries) in Western Europe. The author surveys and analyzes the ways people wrote about pain in different situations (like the difference between childbirth and toothache), and the ways people described their own pains. In a world with very few pain-killers and nothing at all to make surgery bearable, people suffered much more pain than we do today. Consequently, since they could not banish pain, they sought meanings for it. Physicians claimed that one should not try to soothe pain, since pain was an indicator of disease and as such, it was useful. Lawyers and judges claimed that the infliction of pain by torture was a tried-and-true method for eliciting true confessions from criminal suspects. Experts in Christian theology debated the nature of Christ’s pain during his Crucifixion, and mystics tried to identify with it, even to feel it. The common people were exhorted by preachers to bear their illnesses with patience, since pain on earth saved them future sufferings in the afterworld. In conclusion, medieval attitudes towards pain were radically different from modern ones: while we try and conquer pain, seeing it as a challenge, people in the past, who were often in constant pain, gave reasons for suffering and adopted pain as part of their lives.