Ronald Melzack
| Ronald Melzack | |
|---|---|
 |
|
| Born |
July 19, 1929 Montreal, Quebec, Canada |
| Nationality | Canadian |
| Alma mater | McGill University |
| Occupation | psychologist, university professor |
Ronald Melzack, OC OQ FRSC (born July 19, 1929) is a Canadian psychologist and emeritus professor of psychology at McGill University. In 1965, he and Patrick David Wall revolutionized pain research by introducing the gate control theory of pain.
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. During the mid-1970s, he developed the McGill Pain Questionnaire and became a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Pain. He also became the founding editor of Wall & Melzack's Textbook of Pain
Melzack has received numerous honors including Prix du Québec (1994), the Order of Canada (1995), and the National Order of Quebec (2000). In 2010, he won the Grawemeyer Award for his research on the science of pain.
Due to financial constraint, Ron was the only sibling in his family to attend university. His brothers worked in the family bookstore known as "Classic Bookshops" which became a successful chain. He received his M. Sc. from McGill in 1951 and his Ph.D. from McGill in 1954. Donald O. Hebb was Ronald's research advisor at university during the time he worked on his doctoral thesis. Hebb was doing experiments with dogs who had not been normally socialized and Melzack became interested in their unusual response to pain when they would stick their nose in a flame repeatedly.
After studying for his Ph.D. in 1954 with D. O. Hebb at McGill University in Montreal, he began to work with patients who suffered from "phantom limb" pain — people who feel pain in an arm or leg that has been removed. He 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. While still a postdoctoral student, Melzack began collecting "pain words" and putting them into classes that belonged together, like "hot," "burning," "scalding," and "searing".
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