Library
APS Bulletin • Volume 7, Number 6, November/December 1997
APS News
Tribute: John Liebeskind
Dr. John C. Liebeskind, a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and the American Pain Society and a past president of the American Pain Society (1990-1991), died September 8 in his Los Angeles home. He was 62. He died of laryngeal cancer that had spread to his lungs.
Scarcely more than a year earlier, at the IASP's Eighth World Congress on Pain, John had mentioned concern that his presentation on the life of his good friend the late John Bonica would be hindered by his persistently raspy voice, which he presumed was due to a virus. Subsequent tests led to two separate surgeries during the fall and winter of 1996. A laryngectomy left him with a handheld electronic voicebox through which he was still able to spellbind a listener. In June the lung metastases were found, and his prognosis was apparent. He seemed to have very little pain right to the end, and he died with his family present--his wife Julia and his three boys, Gabriel, Nicholas, and Benjamin.
As a student of John's (he never let any of us call him Dr. Liebeskind), I was constantly surprised by his kindness. In 1995 he was the first APS member elected into the National Academy of Sciences, and he was awarded APS's F.W.L. Kerr Award for lifetime achievement. He was justifiably proud of these honors for his work but devoted his entire Kerr award address to the accomplishments of his many students. The fact that he published hundreds of manuscripts is made more amazing by the fact that he was never too busy to talk to an interested undergraduate or to answer a phone call from practically anyone--often to the dismay of a young colleague trying to work with him on "important science." His science was important; it spawned new fields of pain research, including the study of endogenous pain inhibitory circuitry within the central nervous system and the interactions between pain and the immune system. His scientific conclusion, "Pain Can Kill" (Liebeskind, 1991), which was highlighted in his obituary in the September 20 New York Times, provided the impetus for numerous studies of the importance of pain treatment for improving a variety of outcome measures. It has also been a rallying cry for pain practitioners and patients alike as they argue the importance of pain treatment.
Fortunately, pain did not kill John. Unfortunately, he was not able to accomplish all that he had hoped for in his struggle against unnecessary pain. He was president-elect of the IASP at the time of his death, and he had only partially finished "his" history-of-pain project at the University of California at Los Angeles. This endeavor, a collection of important historical documents and more than 30 oral histories that John and his colleagues had obtained from pioneers in the field of pain research and treatment, provides a unique picture of the pain movement. It was lovingly painted by an expert intimately familiar with the events as they occurred.
As I mourn the death of John Liebeskind, I am inspired and challenged by the words with which he remembered John Bonica's fight against pain, words that are so appropriate for his own eulogy:
"We may be secure and comforted in knowing that his great passion remains as an immortal legacy among us, woven into the lives of all who knew him and who continue his battle, and so a part of the next generation of pain warriors we are training, and the next being trained by them, and on and on" (Liebeskind & Meldrum, 1997).
References
Liebeskind, J.C. (1991). Pain can kill. Pain, 44, 3-4.
Liebeskind, J.C., & Meldrum, M.L. (1997). John J. Bonica: World champion of pain. In T.S. Jensen, J.A. Turner, & Z. Wiesenfeld-Hallin (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th World Congress on Pain: Progress in pain research and management (Vol. 8), pp. 19-31. Seattle, WA: IASP Press.
Editor's note: John Liebeskind requested that any gifts in his memory should go to the pain history project, which recently was renamed in his honor:
- John C. Liebeskind History of Pain Project
c/o Cathy Donohue and Allison Bunting, Directors
Louise M. Darling Biomedical Library
UCLA
Box 951798
Los Angeles, CA 90095-1798
Make checks payable to "UC Regents" and include a cover letter explicitly stating that the money should go to this project.
