Science is not enough: the modern history of pediatric pain.

The early modern scientific work on pediatric pain emanated mostly from postwar Europe and was focused on recurrent pains. The seminal work was by Vahlquist [25,26], and later by Bille [10] in Sweden. Vahlquist’s research on pediatric headache in Stockholm and Bille’s doctoral dissertation, a large-scale epidemiologic study of the children of Uppsala, laid the foundation for the many subsequent studies of migraine and other headaches in children and adolescents. Bille followed a smaller group of children with pronounced migraine for 40 years [11]. At about the same time, Apley [7] in Bristol, England published his groundbreaking epidemiological and etiological studies on recurrent abdominal pain. These studies still inform our understanding of this very common but still understudied disorder.