Christianity saw illness as a sign of spiritual taint—a metaphor for sin. In the Gospel, the sick are healed when they accept faith. Our word “pain” is from the Latin poena, or “penalty,” later the Old French peine, or “suffering,” as punishment. In the twentieth century, Freud and his descendants updated this framework by psychologizing illness: the body’s symptoms were now not a sign of sin but a sign of taboo or repressed emotions.
