To the Editor:

Your article on infant pain and its belated recognition by the medical community (Science Times, Nov. 24) suggests that unanesthetized surgery has been limited to newborns and that the practice had largely ended by the late 1970's. However, surveys of medical professionals indicate that as recently as 1986 infants as old as 15 months were receiving no anesthesia during surgery at most American hospitals.

Nor has unanesthetized surgery been the only pediatric practice to expose infants to excruciating pain. Postoperative pain relief and analgesia for severe burns, cancer and similarly painful conditions have also been widely withheld from babies and small children.

The indifference of practitioners to their patients' pain has been especially prevalent in neonatal intensive-care nurseries, where analgesia is frequently omitted during such procedures as surgical insertion of chest tubes, arterial catheterization and intubation - procedures for which adults would demand and receive pain relief.

Research now indicates that infants not only feel the severe pain of such procedures, but they can also be damaged by it physically and perhaps psychologically. A major reason why these cruel and dangerous practices have gone unchallenged for so long is that parents have not been told about them. The consent forms parents sign to authorize surgery and other invasive procedures do not mention the possibility that pain relief might be withheld, and physicians rarely volunteer this information.