McMahon 2006 Wall and Melzack's Textbook of Pain 5th

Preface

Standing on the shoulders of giants, a phrase penned by Newton in a letter to Hooke in 1676 and a motto engraved on some British coins, aptly describes our role in the creation of this new edition of the Textbook of Pain. When the first edition published in 1984 we were both working in Patrick Wall’s laboratory at University College London, as postdoctoral fellow and medical student. Over the past two decades this book has flourished under the editorship of Pat Wall and Ron Melzack and established itself as the leading text in the field. It was their vision that an opus spanning the basic and clinical science of pain from bench to bedside would provide the field with a much needed resource. It was their authority that brought in one text the contributions of many of the key opinion leaders of the field. The
desire to forge together these two, sometimes antagonistic, branches of medicine can be seen from the beginning of Pat’s scientific career. Working in Oxford, he published his first two scientific papers in Nature and Brain, both then and now premier journals in science and neurology, respectively. While Pat was committed to the laboratory study of pain, he never lost sight of the clinical problems. His teaching regularly included walking with his students on the wards of University
College Hospital and discussing with them the pain problems of the patients. It is therefore not surprising that so many basic scientists and clinicians alike readily acknowledge his numerous important contributions that provide the conceptual cornerstones of much
current activity.