History of Labor Pain Relief

Abstract

History of labor has always fluctuated between the private and the public, the natural and the artificial. Well up to the eighteenth century, the preparation and attendance of birth was essentially considered a women’s affair from which males were almost always excluded. As late as 1552, a German physician was publicly branded for having attended as a midwife in a female garb, and still in the early nineteenth century, many obstetricians lamented that during what they called “the dark ages,” the care of women in childbed appertained exclusively to the female sex, especially to those of them who had acquired a certain experience in accouchement and were therefore invested of a certain authority [1]. Angélique du Coudray, the enlightened midwife who employed an anatomical model for surgical demonstrations, was one of the most famous [2].

This text has profited from funds from the Spanish Ministry of Economy (FFI2010-20876:Epistemología Histórica: Historia de las emociones en los siglos XIX y XX). It was written while I was Visiting Professor at the Centre for the Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis, MO. I am very grateful to her Director, Jean Allman, and to all those who made that visit possible.