Dr. Ronald Melzack - Academics

Dr. Patrick Wall, a British doctor, would become one of Dr. Melzack's lifelong contacts. Together at MIT, they questioned current ideas about pain. At the time, pain was considered to be a very simple event. The higher the degree of damage to the body, the larger degree pain was experienced. Pain was thought to be a primitive, unchanging "warning system" that the body was in danger, and the mind had little to do with it.

Dr. Melzack and Dr. Wall, however, noticed that some individuals felt immense pain when damage to the body was minimal, and some people with traumatic injuries experienced little or no pain until a later time. For years, Drs Wall and Melzack discussed these peculiar patients, and in 1965, Gate-Control Theory of Pain was published.