Deliver Me from Pain: Anesthesia and Birth in America

Notes

n o t e s Introduction • “Terrible Torture” or “The Nicest Sensation I’ve Ever Had”? 1. For more on the discovery and use of ether and chloroform, see Martin S. Pernick , A Calculus of Suffering: Pain, Professionalism, and Anesthesia in NineteenthCentury America (Columbia University Press, 1985); Julie M. Fenster, Ether Day: The Strange Tale of America’s Greatest Medical Discovery and the Haunted Men Who Made It (HarperCollins, 2001); and Linda Stratmann, Chloroform: The Quest for Oblivion (Sutton, 2003). 2. The phrases“cheerfulness and gayety”and“terrible torture,hopeless of relief”are in Charles D. Meigs, Obstetrics: The Science and the Art (Blanchard and Lear, 1852), 366; and Bedford Brown,“The Therapeutic Action of Chloroform in Parturition,”Journal of the American Medical Association 25 (August 31, 1895): 354–58, respectively. These types of phrases were not aberrant in the nineteenth century. One sentiment or the other appeared in virtually every obstetric text and article about obstetric anesthesia written in that era. The more recent statements are from Betsy Marvin McKinney, “The Pleasure of Childbirth,” Ladies’ Home Journal, April 1949, 116, 118–21; and Christopher Snowbeck,“Is Elective C-Section Delivery a Good Idea?”Pittsburgh PostGazette , March 18, 2003, D1. 3. David Bogod,“Advances in Epidural Analgesia for Labour: Progress versus Prudence ,” Lancet 345 (May 6, 1995): 1129; Committee on Obstetrics: Maternal and Fetal Medicine, “Pain Relief during Labor,” ACOG Committee Opinion, no. 118 (January 1993). 4. Studies indicating that anxiety, expectations, and prior belief increase labor pain include U. Waldenström, V. Bergman, and G. Vasell, “The Complexity of Labor Pain: Experiences of 278 Women,”Journal of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology 17 (1996): 215–28; U. Waldenström, I. M. Borg, B. Olsson, M. Skold, and S. Wall,“The Childbirth Experience: A Study of 295 New Mothers,” Birth 23 (1996): 144–53. 5. For discussions of how pain differs across cultures and individual experience, see Arthur Kleinman, Paul E. Brodwin, Byron J. Good, and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, “Pain as Human Experience: An Introduction,” in Pain as Human Experience: An Anthropological Perspective, ed. Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good, Paul E. Brodwin, 206 Notes to Pages 3–6 Byron J. Good, and Arthur Kleinman (University of California Press, 1994), 1–28; David B. Morris, The Culture of Pain (University of California Press, 1991), esp. chap. 2, “The Meanings of Pain.” For a specific discussion of labor pain across cultures, see Lynn Clark Callister, Inaam Khalaf, Sonia Semenic, Robin Kartchner, and Katri Vehvilainen-Julkunen, “The Pain of Childbirth: Perceptions of Culturally Diverse Women,” Pain Management Nursing 4 (2003): 145–54. For more on changing perceptions of pain over time, see Roselyne Rey, The History of Pain (Harvard University Press, 1995). 6. For discussions of how birth practices differ across cultures, see Louise W. Hedstrom and Niles Newton,“Touch in Labor:A Comparison of Cultures and Eras,”Birth 13 (September 1986): 181–86; Betsy Lozoff, Brigitte Jordan, and Stephen Malone, “Childbirth in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” Marriage and Family Review 12 (1988): 35–60; Janice M. Morse and Caroline Park, “Differences in Cultural Expectations of the Perceived Painfulness of Childbirth,” in Childbirth in America: Anthropological Perspectives, ed.Karen L.Michaelson (Bergin and Garvey,1988); Russel A.Judkins and Ann B. Judkins,“Commentary: Cultural Dimensions of Hmong Birth,”Birth 19 (September 1992): 148–50; P. Mancino, J. Melluso, M. Monti, and E. Onorati,“Preparation for Childbirth in Different Cultures,” Clinical and Experimental Obstetrics and Gynecology 32 (2005): 89–91. 7. For typical textbook descriptions of labor, see Nicholson J. Eastman, Williams Obstetrics (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1950), 324–39; Jack A. Pritchard, Paul C. MacDonald , and Norman F. Gant, Williams Obstetrics (Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1985), 306–7; and Neville F. Hacker and J. George Moore, Essentials of Obstetrics and Gynecology (W. B. Saunders, 1998), 150–54. 8. “Easily handled,”“the part of labor,”“joyful, not painful,”and“the fun part”are found in Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves: A Book by and for Women (Simon and Schuster, 1976), 271; “no pain at all” is in Mary Thomas, Post-War Mothers: Childbirth Letters to Grantly Dick-Read, 1946–1956 (University of Rochester Press, 1997), 171. 9. Robert A. Bradley,“Fathers’ Presence in Delivery Rooms,”Psychosomatics 3 (November –December 1962): 474–79. Bradley eventually formulated the Bradley Method, now touted by the American Academy of Husband-Coached Childbirth. The Bradley Method advocates relaxation exercises, enabled by a coach, during labor. Bradley advocates claim that over 90% of women trained...