Shifting understandings of labour pain in Canadian medical history

Abstract

While pain in childbirth is a universal, cross-cultural, biological reality, individual experiences and perceptions of this pain are historically and culturally specific. At the turn of the 20th century-a key period in terms of both the medicalisation of birth and the professionalisation of obstetrics in the Canadian context-Canadian physicians understood and conceptualised 'birth pangs' in a number of varying (and at times competing) ways. Throughout the 19th century, doctors emphasised the broader utility of pain as a diagnostic tool and a physiologically necessary part of the birthing process. With the advent of anaesthetics, including chloroform and ether, however, a growing subset of the medical profession simultaneously lauded the professional, physiological, and humanitarian benefits of pain relief. By the first decades of the 20th century, shifting understandings of labour pain-and particularly growing distinctions between 'pain' and 'contraction' in mainstream medical discourses-underscored the increasing use of obstetric anaesthesia. Drawing on a broad range of medical texts and professional literature, and focusing on a key historical moment when the introduction and adoption of a new medical technology opened up possibilities for professional debate, this paper unpacks both the micropolitics and the macropolitics of shifting understandings of labour pain in modern Canadian medical history.

Hanna Rion andThe Weekly Dispatch’s twilight sleep crusade

“…However, he saw upper-class women as more civilised than those of perceived lower classes or races, and therefore more in need of pain relief ( Leavitt 1986 , 130; MacIvor Thompson 2019 , 68). While it was a commonly held view that white, middle-class and upper-class women were becoming more ‘delicate’ and sensitive to pain, Rion herself did not appear to express it in any of her writings ( Wood 2018 ). Instead, Rion called on the state to make twilight sleep available to women of all classes ( Ver Beck 1916 , 111–12).…”

Pain and the human condition

“…Reproduction and reproductive health is a theme among the papers in the  Theme Issue, which is significant given the extent to which such contexts are particularly active sites both for pain and for silencing women’s narratives of pain. Thus, in her paper, Whitney Wood analyses constructions of labour pain in Canadian history 6. In pain studies, as in most medical and health humanities scholarship originating in the West, there exists a paucity of work addressing non-Western narratives and experiences of pain.…”