Hadzic's Regional Anesthesia > Part I. History > Chapter 1. The History of Local Anesthesia Bonnie Deschner, MD, Christopher Robards, MD, Lakshmanasamy Somasundaram, MD, William Harrop-Griffiths, MD

A Few Thoughts on Pain

"Fundamental to modern neural blockade is the concept that pain is a sensory warning conveyed by specific nerve fibers, amenable, at least in principle, to modulation or interruption anywhere in the nerve's pathway. This outlook may be traced back to developments in the study of physiology that finally supplanted the view, first expressed by Plato and Aristotle, that pain, like pleasure, is a passion of the soul, ie, an emotion and not one of the senses. Philosophical changes growing out of the great revolutions of the eighteenth century and the birth of biology as a science gradually, although not entirely, effaced the religious connotations of pain in Western civilization. The doctrine of specific energies of the senses was first promulgated by Johannes P. Müller (1801–1858) in 1826.⁸⁰ This doctrine, although not specific for the conduction of pain, initiated the movement of scientific thought toward analysis and classification of the specific characters of different nerves. The theory that pain was a separate and distinct sense was first definitively developed by Moritz S. Schiff (1823–1896) in 1858. By examining the effect of incisions in the spinal cord, Schiff was able to demonstrate that touch and pain were independent sensations. On animals, he demonstrated that injury to specific sections of the spinal cord resulted in loss of one modality without affecting the other.⁸¹..."