Anesthesiology - Argument Paper

Despite its obvious advantages, pain-free surgery, dentistry and especially pain-free childbirth were opposed by conservative minority. The city of Zurich initially outlawed anesthesia altogether. "Pain is a natural and intended curse of the primal sin. Any attempt to do away with it must be wrong", averred the Zurich City Fathers. Their stance contrasts with the more enlightened Swiss attitude of the 1990's. Latter-day Zurich experimented with what became known as Needle Park. Addicts could openly buy narcotics and inject heroin without police intervention. In Scotland, Sir James Young Simpson, eloquent advocate of chloroform anesthesia and pioneer of painless delivery in childbirth, offended various Calvanist Scotts by his presumption. For didn't Genesis 3:16 declare: "Unto the woman he said 'I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and they conception; in sorrow and thou shalt bring forth children' "? Religious traditionalists held that mothers ought to fulfill the "edict of bringing forth children in sorrow" as laid down in the Holy Bible. Simpson was accordingly denounced by a vocal minority of ministers and priests as a blaspheming heretic who uttered words put into his mouth by Satan. One clergyman saw the new chloroform anesthesia as "a decoy from Satan, apparently offering to bless woman; but, in the end, it will harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries, which arise in time of trouble for help." God's reaction to being robbed of the cries of women in labor is not on record; but there were mutterings that infants delivered painlessly should be denied the sacrament of baptism. This never came to pass: mid-Victorian religious opposition to anesthesia was neither as widespread nor as organized as some historians were later to suggest. Yet a hostile reaction to human tampering with the God-given order of things hadn't always been empty rhetoric. In the text of his, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology, Mr. White relates