Cheiron’s Young Scholar Award Committee is pleased to announce that Matthew Soleiman, a PhD candidate in the Department of History and Science Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego, has been chosen to receive the 2023 award for his paper “Recerebrated: The Rise of the Clinic in the Twentieth-Century Science of Pain.”

Using published and archival sources, Soleiman’s paper examines two key developments in early- to mid-twentieth century pain research. One approach, laboratory studies of the type championed by the noted physiologist Charles Sherrington and his followers, relied upon “decerebration,” a kind of experimental practice that physically separated the “mind” – most notably, its experiences of pain – from bodily reflexes. Placing this work in a larger social context, Soleiman argues that decerebration “reconciled the study of pain in non-human animals with the ethical concerns of the anti-vivisectionists.”

A second approach, associated with the neurosurgeon William Livingston and the anesthesiologist Henry Beecher, advocated leaving the lab and decerebrated animals, which, they argued, could not stand in for a human patient. Instead, clinical research was to focus on verbal reports of pain as it was actually experienced, by maimed industrial workers and wounded soldiers, for example. As Soleiman argues, the goal of this approach was to “recerebrate the scientific subject” and demonstrate that all “sensation” was, in fact, “perception.”

By contrasting the practices of decerebration and recerebration, Soleiman provides an alternative account of the emergence of a clinical science of pain.