The 63-year-old patient at Massachusetts General Hospital was dying of cancer of the pharynx and sinuses. No more surgery was possible, and he could barely tolerate the pain even when he was petting frequent injections of a morphine-type drug. Then, during the last three months of his illness, the tormented man found relief. His doctors tried a brand-new type of electrical treatment, and he discovered that he could switch off the worst of his pain simply by pressing a button on a little box in his shirt pocket.

Into the Brain. Because the technique involves drastic brain surgery before the electrical current can do its work, explain Psychiatrist Frank Ervin and Boston City Hospital's Neurosurgeon Vernon H. Mark, it is only for the occasional patient whose condition is severe enough to justify the heroic procedure. But it offers more hope of substantial surcease than any other treatment now available.

Press-the-button relief depends on the fact that much perception of pain depends, in turn, on electrical nerve impulses passing through the thalamus, a junction box below the base of the brain. If the circuitry in the thalamus is interrupted or disrupted, even the in tractable pain of cancer may be allayed. The Ervin-Mark technique requires drilling holes in the skull (under a general anesthetic), then using elaborate stereoscopic instruments to place four electrodes at selected points in the brain, two of them in the thalamus itself. The electrodes are left in place and cause no pain in the insensitive brain. The little wounds where their connecting wires pass through the skull soon heal, and connections to the ''pain box" are readily attached through a permanent plug on the scalp.

From Dour to Cheery. Their patient, say Drs. Ervin and Mark, was "usually a dour and surly individual," at the best of times. After they fitted him with electrodes and gave him a little transistorized stimulator capable of sending a weak current through his thalamus whenever he pressed a button, he cheerfully reported absence of pain after 15 or 20 minutes. If he kept the current on for 45 minutes to an hour, the pain relief lasted as long as six to eight hours and gave him a night of uninterrupted, pain-free sleep -- an invaluable benefit. During the last six weeks of his life he used only a little codeine and relied heavily on his pain box.

When he kept it on for long periods, his family noticed that his speech was slurred, he seemed a trifle tipsy and unduly gay. The patient himself said that a jolt of current left him feeling as though he had downed two martinis -- with (he added benefit of immeasurably greater pain relief.

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