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Pain is one of the symptoms which most quickly drive the patient to consult a doctor, and its relief is a major aim of treatment, whether by drugs, by operation, or by physiotherapy. It is therefore of immense importance to investigate the mechanisms which cause the patient to experience the sensation of pain, and it is a reproach to modern medicine that We still know so little of such a fundamental matter. The study of pain is a meeting place of many fields of inquiry; the biochemist may interest himself in the nature of the painful stimulus, the physiologist in the character of the nervous impulses which lead to the sensation of pain. The pharmacologist may study the events which occur in local or general anaesthesia, and the clinician can observe in his patients the varieties and anomalies of painful experience. But perhaps the most basic type of research on pain is done by the anatomist, whose object is to investigate the structure and disposition of the nerve-endings, nerve fibres and nervous pathways involved in the events which result in the patient feeling pain.