Louis starts his physiotherapy story in the 1970s. The first three sections describe who and what were influencing manual therapy in the 1980s. Louis questions the lack of pain discussion and understanding. Sections one to nine discuss the dorsal horn, memory biology, placebo, stress, nociceptive pain mechanisms, the sympathetic nervous system, healing, and adaptation. Section ten describes how Louis developed The Mature Organism Model (MOM), which is now used worldwide to teach physiotherapists about input/output mechanisms and processing changes. Book one is an expansion of the first half of Louis' two-day lecture program, The Clinical Biology of Aches and Pains, a course Louis first taught in Adelaide in 1993 and continued to teach until he had to stop lecturing in 2007.