Duden's intellectual project, in a phrase, is "body history" (she uses the phrase on 181)
she wants to understand "the corporeal experience of an epoch" in order to understand "how different it was from the contemporary, learned body image"
this should allow us to understand "the perception and interpretation of the body that was most concretely lived"
"The language of pain and the articulation of suffering, as cultural achievements in enduring pain, are historical phenomena" (88)