Not many exhibitions at the Science Museum carry a health warning. But a new show entitled Pain: Passion, Compassion, Sensibility, that opened this week, warns visitors to enter with care. Torturers’ instruments, the bloody costume of a bullfighter, even a film of a leg being amputated — this is not for the faint-hearted.

It opened to the criticisms of some scientists, who feared that it would celebrate the ghoulish and the macabre to the detriment of science. The Wellcome Trust, who put it on, defended the presentation. “We can’t put on a show about pain which doesn’t cover the territory,” says Ken Arnold, the head of exhibitions for the trust. “Pain is a universal experience and a lot of people find it very interesting.”

It would be a pity if visitors were put off by the publicity. Pain is such a huge subject that to treat it in a purely scientific way would ignore most of its historical and cultural implications.

Pain is universal, but describing and measuring it is difficult. Once it has passed, it is quickly forgotten. But it is as necessary to life as breathing. Children born unable to feel pain seldom live beyond their twenties, thanks to the injuries they unknowingly inflict on themselves.

Today’s medicine devotes itself to the control of pain; not always successfully. But some 19th-century doctors saw the role of pain quite differently, believing that a patient’s screams during an operation conducted without anaesthetic were part of the cure. Hippolyte Bilon, a French physician, even argued in 1803 that diseases could be diagnosed by the qualities of the patient’s screams. Laughable as such claims now seem, they are part of the cultural history of pain, a history that crosses all disciplines and about which artists, scientists and philosophers can speak with equal authority. The exhibition, curated by the Spanish philosopher Javier Moscoso, explores the contradictions and unexpected continuities in the understanding of pain.

Roman Catholicism has long glorified pain as the path to redemption, its iconography full of drawings of saints flayed to death. But these drawings led directly, says Moscoso, to the first proper depictions of human anatomy. “The icon of pain became the anatomical figure,” he says.

Pain was also a way of establishing the truth. The exhibition has assembled a chilling collection of torturers’ tools, including a Spanish device for tearing out the tongue, a thumbscrew and a huge iron boot, probably of English origin, designed to hold boiling oil. Hot-foot to Hell is the grim message it conveys.

Yet even here, in the heart of darkness, the message is ambiguous. In the same cabinet is a tiny ivory figure of a naked woman, delicately carved and set inside an iron maiden, a box with spikes on the inside used for torture. The effect is clearly intended to be arousing, reminding us that the infliction of pain has a sexual dimension too. The point is more plainly made in a small enclosure the size of a telephone kiosk and plastered with the prostitutes ’ cards often encountered there. “If it’s pain you want, it’s agony you’ll get,” says one card. “Your pain is my pleasure”, another guarantees. But the shock comes when you step inside the kiosk, to hear the words of St Theresa of Avila and William James, the author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, describing the penances through which the religious achieved spiritual enlightenment.

“Pain and a liking for pain were linked to asceticism” says Moscoso, “but we are not trying to equate sex and religious experience.”

Even more shocking to many will be a second kiosk showing an early 20th-century film of the amputation of a leg. The purpose here, he says, is to illustrate that pain can still be felt in a limb that no longer exists.

The show does have a more conventional scientific side, with exhibits on the emergence of anaesthesia, but even here the oddities of human nature keep intruding.

In the late 19th century, pictures of young women naked and anaesthetised in front of male doctors were common, playing to a public fear about the loss of control that anaesthetics made possible. One Spanish engraving in this genre shows a surgeon holding up the heart he has removed from a naked woman, reputed in life to have been cold and distant. “And she had a heart!” is the title of this bizarre work.

The show does not try to draw conclusions but to provoke thought. In the catalogue (available only as a CD-Rom, £2), Lucy Bending of the University of Reading argues that modern scientific ideas about pain have been won at a cost.

“If bodily pain is simply something to be alleviated at all costs” she argues, “then those beliefs that had made it possible to bear it and to suffer with Christian fortitude have largely made their exit and the sufferer is left with the pain itself and a bottle of pills, rather than an internal system of understanding, to assuage it.”

Or, as the exhibition makes clear, there is more to pain than a dull ache. It is an integral part of the misery and the splendour of living.

DON’T MISS: DEATH OF A BULLFIGHTER

The show has a distinctly Spanish flavour, with images by Goya and four modern Spanish artists. But the exhibit most likely to inflame English sensibilities is the bloodstained costume worn by Manuel Granero, a young hero of the bullring gored to death in 1922. He was only 20, but already an idol, when he met the bull called Pocapena (Little Pain) in the Madrid bullring on May 7, 1922.

He was gored in the thigh, fell to the ground and was killed when Pocapena thrust a horn through his eye. Among the observers at the plaza that day was Georges Bataille, a French writer and philosopher, who turned what he had seen into Story of the Eye, an allegory of pain, death and desire — a classic (say some) of erotic literature.

To accompany this iconic object, borrowed from the museum in Valencia, Granero’s home town, there will be recordings of the flamenco singer Curro Piñana singing saetas — solo songs sung at Easter and deriving their name from the arrows used in a common form of execution in 16th-century Spain. Strong stuff.

Nigel Hawkes is The Times health editor

Pain: Passion, Compassion, Sensibility, at the Science Museum, Exhibition Road, London SW7 2DD (0870 8704868) runs until June 20. Admission free

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