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Today in pulp... a brief history of pain. 
So what is pain? Well it's nature's way of telling you to stop doing something. It comes in many forms and has puzzled science and medicine for many centuries...
Aristotle didn't believe pain was a sense. He thought it was an emotion and as such the brain played no part in it: the heart governed emotions and so it must govern pain.
René Descartes however thought it must have a more mechanical basis: pain would travel along 'pain fibers' in the body from the source of the injury. This eventually led to the specificity theory: pain is a specific sensation, with its own individual sensory apparatus.
However Erasmus Darwin believed that pain was not a unique sensory experience, but a stronger than usual version of our more common sensations. His Intensive theory argued that pain can be generated by any sensory stimulus, provided it is intense enough.
Nowadays many scientists see pain as a biopsychosocial phenomenon: specific nerve signals and our mental state affect how and what we perceive as pain. In some respects it is all in the mind, though that's no comfort to you if you just sat on a pin!
Analgesic drugs are our normal solution to experiences of pain. There are many types but morphine remains the gold standard. Extensive use during the American Civil War allegedly resulted in over 400,000 sufferers from the "soldier's disease" of morphine addiction.
Less powerful pain treatments include ibuprofen, paracetamol and aspirin. None are really specific to any body area, so beware products saying they are for such-and-such a pain.
'Painkiller' as a word was first coined in 1849, and the image of killing a pain off seems linked to the old idea that demons or other creatures are the cause and need to be exorcised.
Do we have a memory of pain? We can certainly remember things that cause us to experience pain in responde, but it's fair to say that as an experience in itself pain is not encoded as a memory.
