Short Circuit

Pain, most doctors believe, is a good thing in small doses. It is often the only warning of some invisible internal disorder. But Dr. Angelo Luigi Soresi, onetime professor of surgery at New York's old Homeopathic Medical College and Flower Hospital, disagrees with the vast majority of his colleagues. Pain, he insists, is not a physiological (and therefore ' normal) sensation, but pathological--experienced only after a breakdown somewhere in the nervous system. Pain cannot be normal, Soresi argues, because he does not believe that receptors for pain have been found among the nerve endings.

(Most eminent anatomists believe that they have been found.)

Through recent articles in several medical journals, and in interviews last week, Dr. Soresi expounded his pet theory: that the nervous system is like an involved electrical circuit, and that pain is felt only when there is a short circuit.

"The protective, defensive role of pain was scientifically shot to smithereens," Soresi declares, "by . . . [Herbert S.] Gasser when he determined . . . the speed at which the various fibers transmit impulses and proved that the alleged pain fibers are among the slowest, if not actually the slowest." Nature, says Soresi, could not have been so inept as to give warning duty to its slowest couriers.*

Soresi contends that pain gives no protection against injury because it gives no signal until after some injury has been suffered. (The same argument might be used against fire alarms, which do not sound until a fire has broken out.) Pain does not even give protection against mosquito bites, he argues, because it is felt only after the mosquito "has sucked your blood and perhaps infected you with malaria." Soresi does not mention the fact that after one or two mosquito bites, most people know enough to head for a screened porch.

Soresi, who has been denouncing pain for 30 years, hopes some day to have his own laboratory to probe deeper into the resemblance between the nervous system and an electric circuit.

* The Rockefeller Institute's famed Neurophysiologist Gasser showed that pain is transmitted along low, medium-and high-speed fibers.

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