Willem Noordenbos (medic, 1910)

Willem Noordenbos (born August 11, 1910 in Utrecht , † March 1990 ) was a Dutch neurosurgeon and pain researcher.

He was the son of the surgeon of the same name Willem Noordenbos (1875-1954), who was a professor at the University of Amsterdam, and Jacoba Cornelia Noordenbos-Kapteijn, daughter of the astronomer Jacobus Cornelius Kapteijn and one of the first women doctors in the Netherlands. Noordenbos studied medicine first in Amsterdam and then (to escape the shadow of his father) at the University of Edinburgh, graduating in 1937 (Bachelor in Medicine (MB) and Surgery (Ch.B.)), where he began his training as a surgeon. In 1939 he returned to the Netherlands for mobilization. He was briefly imprisoned after the German occupation because he protested violently about the imprisonment of his father (he was, as a prominent Dutchman, taken hostage to a camp). He graduated from the University of Amsterdam in medicine in 1941. His training as a neurosurgeon took place at CH Lenshoek in Amsterdam. In 1943 he married Cornelia ("Cox") van Heemskerck van Beest, who worked in a medical laboratory and with whom he had three daughters and a son. In the 1940s he worked as a neurosurgeon. In 1946 he attended British neurosurgical clinics for six months and in 1950 he was the only neurosurgeon in the Dutch East Indies for six months. From 1946 he was a neurosurgeon at the University Clinic in Amsterdam (Wilhelmina Gasthuis), whose neurosurgical department he built up, from 1954 as the chief surgeon. In 1959 he received his doctorate in Amsterdam (Doctor in de Geneeskunde). In 1965 he became professor of neurosurgery there. In 1976 he gave up surgery, but remained active in pain research.

His dissertation was published as a book in 1959. In it he advocated a new thesis on the origin of pain, which was also an essential stimulus for the gate control theory of Ronald Melzack and Patrick David Wall (1965). According to Noordenbos, there is a mechanism for suppressing and filtering the constantly occurring afferent stimuli to the brain (multisynaptic afferent system, MAS), with A- fibers (which are evolutionarily younger) suppressing the pain-conducting C-fibers. Noordenbos explained his own experience as a surgeon that severing nerve tracts usually does not make pain go away (it returns after one to six months and is then often felt much more unpleasant, anesthesia dolorosa ). In his dissertation he specifically described 21 patients who suffered from osteoarthritis and on whom he performed a unilateral chordotomy (cutting of the spinothalamic tract from the spinal cord to the thalamus ). Only two became pain-free, nine were relatively satisfied, ten had new pain (intense burning sensation). The gate control theory supported Noordenbos from the beginning. ${\displaystyle \partial }$

With Patrick David Wall he studied phantom pain in injured people in the Yom Kippur War from 1973.

He was a member of the Dutch, French, British, Spanish, American and German neurosurgical societies. In 1973 he was a founding member of the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP) and was on its council and at times vice-president.

He died in 1990 of meningitis.

Noordenbos was an avid sailor who built his own sailing boats and crossed the Atlantic in 1962 and 1978. At the age of 18 he sailed alone across the North Sea to Copenhagen in a sailing boat without a cabin. He also invented a system for seawater desalination, but had no time to reduce it to a manageable format suitable for sailing boats.

Fonts

• Pain: problems pertaining to the transmission of nerve impulses, Elsevier 1959

Web links

• Willem Noordenbos papers , Online Archive of California
• Brief biography and photo , Society of Neurological Surgeons

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Noordenbos, Pain: problems pertaining to the transmission of nerve impulses, Elsevier 1959
2. ↑ Sytze van der Zee, Pain, a Biography, Knaus Verlag, 2012