The History of Pain Medicine
Pain is the oldest medical problem. For centuries, chronic pain was dismissed as imaginary. John Bonica, the “father of pain medicine,” founded the International Association for the Study of Pain in 1973 and established multidisciplinary pain clinics. Melzack and Wall’s gate control theory (1965) revolutionised understanding. Pain medicine was formally recognised as a subspecialty in 1991, evolving from anaesthesiology’s cradle.
