ABSTRACT
Rene Descartes’ seventeenth-century model of pain, which first recognised the role of the brain in sensory perception, held sway with few modifications until the mid-1960s; it likened the nervous system to a grid of electrical wires carrying pain signals directly from sites of injury to the brain where sensations appropriate to the degree of tissue damage were recorded as pain. In 1965, Ronald Melzack’s and Patrick Walls’s Gate Control Theory (GCT) of pain replaced Descartes’ hypothesis, and despite ongoing modifications and expansions essentially remains in place; according to Melzack and Walls, certain nerve cells in the spinal cord admit and intensify or reduce pain impulses before either transmitting them to pain centres in the brain or impeding transmission altogether. The GCT suggested that admittance of pain could be influenced by interpretative responses to pain – by expectation, attitude, memory – thus introducing a mind-body hypothesis.
