A study of the attitudes of general surgical patients to the management of their postoperative pain showed that although 86% initially expressed satisfaction with their postoperative pain relief, a quarter of these did in fact have moderate, severe or unbearable, unalleviated pain. These, together with those who expressed dissatisfaction with their pain relief, constituted one third of the total number, indicating that a problem of postoperative analgesic management existed in the hospital. As a result, techniques of continuous intravenous infusion of narcotics and more frequent use of regional analgesia have been introduced.