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The
pain is the perfect misery
The worst in the demons, And in excess, It destroys all patience. Milton, "Paradise Lost" |
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The pain has been the lash from the beginning of the humanity of the times and its cause and meaning they have been base of speculations and beliefs. In the old Egypt, India and China, it was thought that the gods, demons and spirits of the deads, originated the pain. |
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Ravâna, the demon that brings the illness, of Angkor. |
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Papyrus
of Ebers (1600 BC). The text offers recipes prepared by the divinities
Nut and Isis, to cure the headaches. |
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Hesy-Ré,
"The dental doctors' boss", of the Third Egyptian Dynasty. |
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Points of the China acupuncture. |
Hipocrates sustained that the pain took place for an imbalance among the four humors that it supposed that they controlled our organism: bleed, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile. Hipocrates wrote: "Divinum est opus sedare dolorum" (to alleviate the pain is divine work) |
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Hipocrates |
Platon affirmed that the pain was not only presented by outlying stimulation, but like an emotional experience that resided in the heart. For Platon, the pain and the pleasure they were opposed sensations that resided in the heart and they were passions of the soul. |
Harvey,
discoverer of the circulation of the blood, believed in 1628 that was
in the heart where the pain was perceived. |
In
the year 1662 were published "De Homine", it works posthumous
of Descartes, in which proposed an outline of the pain in which
the painful sensation arrived to the brain through the spinal nerves and
where it considered that the pineal gland was the seat of the soul. |
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The Perception Theory of Descartes. |
In the XIX century you began to sit down the scientific bases of the mechanisms of the pain. It
was considered then that pain was a sensation apart from those of sensibility
and temperature. It was thought that some specific nerves drove the pain
sensation and that these fibers had specific terminations, structured
in an exclusive way for this sensation. |
Von
Frey it introduced the concept of the specificity of the terminal
organs that he thought as causing of the beginning of the nervous conduction
of the pain. |
In
the year 1874, Erb it exposed that the sum of the intensity can
cause pain through the normal fibers that take the sensation of sensibility,
pressure and temperature. |
Goldscheider,
in the year 1894, it
exposed the theory that the pain was the result of the intensity of the
outlying stimulation that caused the sum from the sensorial afferent to
the dorsal horn of the spinal marrow. |
In
the year 1943, Livingston it sustained that the intense outlying
stimulation of the nerves was the result of the local tissular damage
that activated the nervous fibers that were projected toward the spinal
marrow. |
The pain like specific entity was considered for the first time by John Bonica, in its classic text of 1953 "The management of pain." Until then, the pain was considered a symptom that accompanied to many illnesses, but without own entity. |
Noordenbos,
in the year 1959, it formulated the theory of the dual transmission, according
to the one which, the sensations are transmitted by two systems: Myelinated
Nerve (quick system) and Non Myelinated Nerve (slow system). |
Besides
the concepts of neuroanatomy and Neurophisiology of pain, in the last
century numerous contributions have been formulated on: Receivers of the
pain (nociceptors) and Biochemistry of the neurotransmitters and chemical
mediators of the pain. |
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