Duden 153: "the women [examined by Storch in the eighteenth century] frequently consolidated [their] chaotic multitude of painful sensations into one ailment, one 'thing'"
rephrased later on 153: "In the language of the patients' complaints, pain was 'something' that wandered about the body, changed location and form, but was thought of as one thing"
157: "the experience of the sufferer shaped the temporally disparate and physically scattered sensations into a personal story of suffereing. Thus the abundance of expressions for pain lead into the account of an individual story"
[see also "The obsolete language of the experience of pain," separate note)
This "is very different from today. In a medicalized culture such as ours, it is not people who are ill with something, but their bodies and organs that are diseased"
Duden quotes Ivan Illich here: "There is no historical precedent for the contemporary situation in which the experience of personal bodily pain is shaped by the therapeutic program designed to destroy it."
see his Medical Nemesis: The Expropriation of Health (1976)