With the death of Patrick Wall on August 8th at the age of 76, an era has ended in the study of the nervous system. The professor of anatomy at University College London from 1967-1990, and then emeritus professor, based at London's St Thomas's Hospital, he will be remembered for his research and theory concerning the nature of pain and for studies on the plasticity of the central nervous system and the function of the spinal cord.
Born in Nottingham of Irish parents from Greystones, Co Wicklow, his father, Thomas, was director of education for Middlesex. He was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Christ Church, Oxford, where he studied medicine.
As a student at London's Middlesex Hospital, he spent the summer in the St Mary's Hospital laboratory of Fleming, when the story of penicillin had just started to flourish. After graduating in 1948, he went to the US to start research on the nervous system, a theme that he continued to pursue until days before his death.
After stints at Yale (1948-1950), the University of Chicago (1950-1953) and Harvard (1953-1955), he became associate professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1957-1960), and then professor there. In 1967, he returned to the UK to take up a chair in J.Z. Young's anatomy department at University College London, and from 1973 held an appointment at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, running laboratories in both places.
He once remarked that in order to succeed in science, one has to choose an important subject that no one else is working on, write a book about it and start a journal for it. So he started research on the mechanisms of pain, a subject largely ignored by research at the time, founded Pain, the premier journal of the field, and co-edited the first, and authoritative, Textbook of Pain (1983, fourth edition 1999). In addition, he leaves a legacy of associates and students who branched off to fill chairs throughout the world. He received many honours, including fellowship of the Royal Society (1989) and the Royal Medal of the Royal Society (1999). In 1993, the International Association for the Study of Pain awarded him life membership, and in 1999 held its world congress in his honour. He was a fellow of the Royal Society of Physicians (1984) and the Royal Society of Anaesthesiologists (1992).
Patrick Wall was always fast to spot ill-explained paradoxes in science, and his insight into the puzzle that the amount of pain is often not related to the magnitude of tissue damage led to the "gate control" theory of pain that he formulated with his lifelong collaborator Ron Melzack. Published in Science in 1965, it led to several new forms of pain treatment, including transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation (Tens) and dorsal column stimulation.
Sparked by his experience with amputees of the Yom Kippur war, Patrick Wall began work on phantom pain and pain following nerve damage. His views that there are dramatic alterations in the central nervous system in chronic pain were at the time fiercely attacked by many, but are now widely accepted as fact.
In an age of multi-media presentations, he had the impressive ability to capture the attention of a large audience in a scientific talk without showing a single slide. He wanted to popularise neuroscience, and this led to several very readable books, including The Challenge Of Pain (with Melzack, 1982, second edition 1989) and Pain: The Science of Suffering (1999).
In Patrick Wall's own words, he liked people who were "witty, world-wise, opinionated, argumentative, iconoclastic, intolerant to fools, and original to the level of eccentricity", and indeed he was a master of these attributes. He indulged in intellectual interactions and had a certain pride of intellectual superiority that percolates through his novel TRIO - The Revolting Intellectuals' Organisation (1966). As many researchers who did not share Patrick Wall's views became painfully aware, his rhetoric could be stinging. At times his vigorous comments were wrong and even insulting, but always put forward with awesome wit and intelligence.
He was a private person who rarely talked about his interests outside science (such as bird-watching), with the exception of politics. The leitmotif of his life was doubting authoritarian pronouncements, and unsurprisingly his political views were distinctly left-wing. While at Oxford, he became chairman of the socialist club and founded his first journal, the British Medical Students' Journal, which supported the introduction of a national health service. He indulged in confronting conservative minds with his views and supported many political causes that he passionately believed in, such as his opposition to rubber bullets and apartheid.
Martin Koltzenburg Patrick David Wall: born 1925; died, August 2001