18 Facts About Ronald Melzack

In 1968, Melzack published an extension of the gate control theory, in which he asserted that pain is subjective and multidimensional because several parts of the brain contribute to it at the same time.

Ronald Melzack has received numerous honors including Prix du Quebec, the Order of Canada, and the National Order of Quebec.

Ronald Melzack was born in Montreal, the son of Joseph Ronald Melzack, who worked in a clothing factory and opened a second-hand bookstore.

Ronald Melzack's brothers worked in the family bookstore known as "Classic Bookshops" which became a successful chain.

Hebb was doing experiments with dogs who had not been normally socialized and Ronald Melzack became interested in their unusual response to pain when they would stick their nose in a flame repeatedly.

Ronald Melzack 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.

Ronald Melzack spent time at the University College of London, and the University of Pisa in Italy.

Ronald Melzack eventually became a faculty member at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he met Dr Patrick Wall.

Ronald Melzack is noted for work on stress-induced analgesia, phantom-limb pain and the theory of neuromatrix.

Ronald Melzack proposes that we are born with a genetically determined neural network that generates the perception of the body, the sense of self, and can generate chronic pain, even when no limbs are present.

Sudden, short-term pain, such as the pain of cutting a finger, is transmitted by a group of pathways that Ronald Melzack calls the "lateral" system, because they pass through the brain stem on one side of its central core.

In 1974, Ronald Melzack co-founded the first pain clinic in Canada at the Montreal General Hospital with Dr Joseph Stratford.

Ronald Melzack was a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Pain and a past president as well as an honorary life member.

Ronald Melzack was a Member of the Canadian Medical Hall of Fame.

Ronald Melzack is the author of several textbooks on pain, and was co-editor of Handbook of Pain Assessment, 1992.

Ronald Melzack has published books of Inuit stories and won the Canada Council Molson Prize in 1985.

Ronald Melzack received the Prix du Quebec for research in pure and applied science, recognizing him as a laureate of the highest honor for a scientist in his home province.

Ronald Melzack's published articles include; Pain mechanisms: A new theory, published in Science magazine in November 1965, The McGill Pain Questionnaire: Major properties and scoring methods published in the journal Pain, in 1975, and re-published by Ronald Melzack in the Journal Anesthesiology, in 2005 and Pain and the neuromatrix in the brain, published in the Journal of Dental Education, in 2001.