Margo McCaffery was an American

registered nurse A registered nurse (RN) is a healthcare professional who has graduated or successfully passed a nursing program from a recognized nursing school and met the requirements outlined by a country, state, province or similar government-authorized ...

and pioneer of the field of

pain management Pain management is an aspect of medicine and health care involving relief of pain (pain relief, analgesia, pain control) in various dimensions, from acute (medicine), acute and simple to chronic condition, chronic and challenging. Most physici ...

nursing Nursing is a health care profession that "integrates the art and science of caring and focuses on the protection, promotion, and optimization of health and human functioning; prevention of illness and injury; facilitation of healing; and alle ...

. McCaffery's oft-quoted definition of pain as "whatever the experiencing person says it is, existing whenever and wherever the person says it does", stated as early as 1968, has become the prevailing conceptualization of pain for clinicians over the past few decades. McCaffery died on January 8, 2018.

References

American nurses American women nurses 2018 deaths Year of birth missing 21st-century American women {{nurse-bio-stub