As Britain's first professor of rheumatology, at the University of Manchester from 1953 to 1976, Jonas 'Yonky' Kellgren, who has died aged 90, greatly advanced the understanding of the physiology of pain. Before that, as the first director, from 1947, of the Manchester University centre for research into chronic rheumatism, he undertook a pioneering study of the extent of rheumatic conditions in Leigh, Lancashire, using epidemiology. His postwar research into the problems of rheumatism in miners led to radiological criteria for the severity of osteoarthritis that remain in use today.
Born in Hindhead, Surrey, Jonas was the son of a refugee mother from Tsarist Russia, and the eldest son of a family that ran a medical institute in Sweden. His parents opened a branch in Eaton Square, London, but the business collapsed and Jonas's father died in the influenza epidemic of 1919.
His education at Bedales and University College London was made possible with the support of a grateful patient and, after gaining degrees in medicine and surgery in 1934, he studied physical medicine in Scandinavia, and researched the physiology of pain under Sir Thomas Lewis at University College hospital.
Pain in the skin, say from a needleprick, can be accurately localised by the brain, but pain in deeper organs can only be vaguely localised. Where pain was felt in places other than its supposed organ of origin, the cause had conventionally been taken to be neuralgia - damage to, or malfunctioning of, a nerve - or neuritis, inflammation of a nerve.
Lewis challenged this explanation by making pain-evoking, but harmless, injections of a 6% salt water solution to see where pain was actually felt. In particular, he did not accept that neuritis was the explanation for the pain of angina pectoris that, when severe, spread down the inner side of the left arm to the fingers.
From 1937 onwards, Kellgren's studies in experimentally-induced pain throughout the body - on subjects including himself - expanded the concept of referred pain. His maps of its distribution became part of standard medical teaching, but recognition was delayed by the onset of the second world war.
In the light of his surgical qualifications, Kellgren was appointed surgeon to the Great Ormond Street hospital for sick children unit that had been evacuated to Hemel Hempstead. With minimal previous hands-on experience, he operated on Dunkirk survivors at Leavesden hospital, Hertfordshire. On joining the Royal Army Medical Corps with the rank of major in 1941, he was posted to frontline work in North Africa, and followed the Allied army through Sicily and Italy.
In 1946, Kellgren went to work at the Wingfield Morris (now Nuffield) orthopaedic hospital in Oxford, where he studied the consequences of peripheral nerve injuries and the effects of cooling on pain perception. The following year came the Nuffield Foundation grant that made possible the rheumatism centre at Manchester, and the opinion-poll style surveying of Leigh, backed up by blood tests, X-rays and laboratory research.
This project gave the first estimates of the population frequency of the known rheumatic diseases, although a third of all complaints were only classifiable as "undetermined" - today, more than 100 different rheumatic conditions are recognised.
In 1948, the coal mining industry asked the rheumatism centre to investigate the problems of rheumatism in miners. The severe damage to their backs, hips and knees were found to arise from continuous heavy lifting while crouching. Kellgren formulated the concept of nodal osteoarthritis, occurring mainly in older women, often in the same family, and characterised by nodes or knobs on the last joints in the fingers and damage to small joints in the neck and low back. It was also frequently associated with osteoarthritis in the knees.
With James Sharp, Kellgren also documented one of the few causes of sudden death in inflammatory arthritis, namely destruction and dislocation of the joints between the top two vertebrae in the neck. Studies were done on gout and on ankylosing spondylitis, the so-called "poker-back" disease mainly affecting young men. He taught that, unlike sufferers from rheumatoid arthritis, ankylosing spondylitis patients were better when exercised and worse if rested, leading to a reversal of then recommended treatments.
Kellgren was appointed an expert adviser to the World Health Organisation in 1961. He was pro-vice chancellor of Manchester University (1969-72) and dean of the medical school (1968-73), coping with student riots and appointing new professors. He also helped to develop postgraduate centres in every district hospital in the Manchester region, and to plan two additional teaching hospital complexes at Salford and south Manchester.
In 1984, Kellgren sat on the Flowers working party that reviewed the 12 London medical schools and 14 postgraduate institutes. In 1996, new research facilities for the Manchester institute of musculoskeletal medicine were named the JH Kellgren laboratories in his honour.
He is survived by Judith, the daughter of his first marriage, which ended in divorce; by his second wife, Thelma, an American nurse, whom he married in 1942; and by their four daughters, Joanna, Nina, Ingrid and Lee.
· Jonas Henrik 'Yonky' Kellgren, rheumatologist, born September 11 1911; died February 22 2002
