Research Director, Pain Clinic, Montreal General Hospital; E.P. Taylor Chair in Pain Studies at McGill , MGH; Professor of psychology, McGill University
After studying for his PhD in 1954 with D. O. Hebb at McGill University, Melzack began to work with patients who suffered from "phantom limb" pain, i.e. people who feel pain in an arm or leg that has been removed. He found that pain often has little survival value, and some pains are entirely out of proportion to the degree of tissue damage, sometimes continuing long after injured tissues have healed. While still a postdoctoral student, Melzack began collecting "pain words" and putting them into classes that belonged together, like "hot," "burning," "scalding," and "searing." In 1975, this pursuit led to the development of the McGill Pain Questionnaire, now used in pain clinics and cancer hospices around the world. Eventually Melzack with his colleague Patrick Wall developed the gate control theory of pain at MIT in 1965, which states that pain is `gated' or modulated by past experience, i.e. perceiving a specific stimulus as pain is a decision of the nervous system. Gate-control theory led to the valuable discovery of endorphins and enkephalins, the body's "natural opiates." Melzack's recent research at McGill indicates that there are two types of pain, transmitted by two separate sets of pain-signalling pathways in the central nervous system. Sudden, short-term pain, such as the pain of scraping a shin or cutting a finger, is transmitted by a group of pathways that Melzack calls the "lateral" system, because they pass through the brain stem on one side of its central core. Prolonged pain, on the other hand, such as the pain experienced months after spraining an ankle, or chronic back pain, is transmitted by the "medial" system, whose neurons pass through the central core of the brain stem. Melzack likes to bicycle, ski, and write children's books.
BSc, 1950, MSc, 1951, PhD, 1954, McGill U. Author: The Challenge of Pain (with Patrick Wall) 1982, 2nd ed. 1988; Textbook of Pain (ed. with Wall) 1984, 2nd ed. 1989; co-editor, Handbook of Pain Assessment, 1992; Why the Man in the Moon is Happy, a collection of Inuit creation stories 1978; The Day Tuk Became a Hunter and other Eskimo stories, 1967; Raven, Creator of the World, 1970. lectr., McGill U. 1953-54; rsch. fellow, U. of Oregon Medical Sch. 1954-57; lectr., U. Coll. London, UK 1957-58; rsch. fellow, U of Pisa, Italy 1958-59; assoc. prof., MIT 1959-63; Fellow of Am. and Can. Psychol. Assns.; Fellow, Roy. Soc. Can.; Immed. Past Pres., Internat. Assn. for the Study of Pain; rec'd Canada Council Molson Prize 1985;
Sources: NSERC; Interview by Claire Wargan, Psychology Today, Aug 1987; Saturday Night, Dec 1988, p.31
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