What a Blessing She Had Chloroform: The Medical and Social Response to the Pain of Childbirth from 1800 to the Present

by Donald Caton

This book describes in fascinating detail the history of the use of anesthesia in childbirth and in so doing offers a unique perspective on the interaction between medical science and social values. Dr. Donald Caton traces the responses of physicians and their patients to the pain of childbirth from the popularization of anesthesia to the natural childbirth movement and beyond. He finds that physicians discovered what could be done to manage pain, and patients decided what would be done.

Dr. Caton discusses how nineteenth-century physicians began to think and act like scientists; how people learned to reject the belief that pain and suffering are inevitable components of life; and how a later generation came to think that pain may have important functions for the individual and society. Finally he shows the extent to which cultural and social values have influenced "scientific" medical decisions.

307 pages, Hardcover

First published June 10, 1999

Reviews

[Jennifer Hallock · Rating 4 out of 5]

Previous reviews claimed that the perspective given to natural childbirth is skewed by the author's bias as an anesthesiologist, and I have no expertise in either field to bring to bear on that debate. As a historian who specializes in the social, political, and economic movements of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, however, I find Caton's observations in those areas to be sound. How he ties medical history—particularly attitudes toward pain and the relief of pain—to those trends is very interesting and well-presented.

(As an author, though, I am shocked that Yale University press could not give him a better cover, or at least a better font—what is that, Helvetica?—and design. It's like they mocked this up in Microsoft Word. Also, maybe significantly, the cover features a male doctor and a newborn baby—no mother. Though the book is mostly about male doctors, so that's on target, what is interesting to me is that the early efforts to reform childbirth practices focused on mothers, not the infants, since the mothers were more likely to die. In any case, my ninth-graders could have designed a better cover, which is too bad for this author.)

[Tope · Rating 2 out of 5]

Caton's recap of the major events in the recent history of childbirth pain management is more or less accurate. His interpretation, however, leaves quite a lot to be desired. His training is as an anesthesiologist, not a historian, and unfortunately his lack of training is fairly evident in the book. His analysis is a haphazard mix of historical facts, literary quotes, pop culture references and highly subjective interpretation thoroughly colored by his medical perspective and his presentist orientation. Worse, there's no unifying organizing principle to make sense of it all. His chapters on the early and the contemporary natural childbirth movements are the most egregious; he makes it very clear that he has no real understanding of the values, ideologies and perspectives that motivate natural childbirth advocates.