YOU ARE AN IGNORANT MAN.
Smallpox inoculations, anesthesia--they opposed it all. They have opposed all progress and held the human race back for centuries with their superstitious crap.
Gen 3:16
"Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy pain and thy conception; in pain thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
rejectionofpascalswager.net
Outlawing of Anaesthetics During Childbirth
Our next issue is regarding the elimination of the pain of women in labor. The alleviation or even complete elimination of pain for a woman in labor is one of the major contributions of medical science. The use of drugs, inhalants and local analgesia such as the epidural has helped many women who would otherwise had needlessly suffered. Today, the use of one form or another of pain relievers has gained widespread acceptance. Yet, as a scientific discovery, it too had a painful birth; thanks to opposition from the Christian churches. This story exposes the Christian theological thought in its barest detail and shows how the Bible could not be used as the basis for making moral judgments.
Christian theologians had always looked at the pain of childbirth as the result of the curse of God on Eve and all her descendents; for disobeying his command. This curse is very clearly spelled out in the Bible:
Genesis 3:16
To the woman, God said, "I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing, in pain shall you bring forth children."
This "heritage of pain" is described many times in the Old Testament:
Isaiah 26:17
Like a woman with child, who writhes and cries out in her pangs, when she is near her time ...
Thus, as Eve cried out in pain to bring for her children, so shall all women throughout history do so. The pain was a reminder of the Fall. So taught the theologians.
Our story begins in 1591 with an Edinburgh woman named Euphanie Macalyane. Unable to bear the pain of childbirth she asked the midwife, Agnes Sampson, to give her a remedy to relieve her suffering. At that time James VI (1566-1625) was the king of Scotland. [It was this same James who upon becoming king of England in 1603 authorized the English translation of the Bible which is known today as the King James Version, or simply, the Authorized Version.] And James, upon hearing of this abomination was furious and ordered Euphanie to be burned alive. It was the pious king's warning to any woman who dare to evade the curse of Eve. [36]
The discoverer of anesthesia for women in labor was the Scottish doctor, James Baker Simpson (1811-1870). As a child he was told of the near fatal pain his mother went through in giving birth to him. It was a scene that was described to him in vivid details. The boy grew up to become a doctor. He was speedily promoted to the post of chief obstetric assistant.
It was in his duty as an obstetrician that he witnessed with his own eyes the suffering that had previously been described to him. As a humanitarian, Simpson was convinced that no woman ought to suffer such an agony. He began working for an analgesic that would help to alleviate this suffering. After many trials and errors he finally discovered that the pain could be reduced with the use of chloroform. He tested his discovery on women in labor with astounding success. On November 10th 1847, in an address to the Edinburgh Medico-Chirurgical Society, Simpson reported that he had tested the analgesic thirty times and met with success every time. Not wanting to keep the discovery to himself, he revealed his methods in the hope that no woman henceforth need to suffer the pangs of labor.
The reaction of the Scottish Calvinist Church was swift and furious. "What a Satanic invention!" they cried, "What a shame upon Edinburgh!" The ecclesiastics objected to this rebellion against God, "Did not the Almighty pronounce this primal curse? Pain of childbirth was God's will. Now one of God's creatures, impiously rebelling against the divine command, had dared to frustrate God's will." Death by fire for heresy had already been abolished by then, no doubt that would have been Simpson's fate had it been allowed. Nevertheless the ecclesiastical authorities still had ways and means of persecuting the doctor. In churches the preachers warned pregnant women that should they allow this devilish treatment to be administered on them, the children will be denied the sacrament of baptism. This warning must have worked for we have record of Simpson complaining to a friend that "Many of my lady patients had strong religious scruples against anesthesia. Most of them consult their ministers." The pulpit was not the only place from which the clergy attacked Simpson. They sent circulars to all doctors in Edinburgh which contain the following words:
To all seeming, Satan wishes to help suffering women but the upshot will be the collapse of society, for the fear of the Lord which depends upon the petitions of the afflicted will be destroyed.
In other words the preachers feared that once pain has been taken away, people will no longer be religious! The doctors, in general, being good Christians sided with the clergy. Most of the Christian laity as well, being a faithful flock of the church, joined in the condemnation of Simpson, and his discovery. In his defense Simpson cited Genesis 2:21 where God put Adam to sleep before taking out one of his ribs to make Eve. But he was no match for the theological sophistry of the Scottish Calvinists. They replied that Adam's "operation" was done before the Fall but that the curse on Eve was pronounced after it. So the curse stays!
For six years the conflict raged. The scale was finally tipped in Simpson's favor when Queen Victoria (1819-1901) accepted the use of anesthetic when she was giving birth to prince Leopold. [37]
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Conclusions
One often hears the defense by Christians that the harm and atrocities committed by Christians in the past were done by men who misused Christianity for their own evil ends and were not due to the fault of the religion itself. However even a cursory look at the examples above shows that such a defense rings hollow here.
* The suppression of Greek rationalistic principles in medicine was an expected consequence of the beliefs that it was God who was the cause of diseases and that miracles and relics were the way to ask God to heal them. Within this context we could understand why Tertullian labeled one of the greatest Greek doctors in antiquity a "butcher".
* We see the same consistent application of theology in the opposition of the early and medieval Christians to the practice of dissecting cadavers. It put the whole idea of bodily resurrection and the veracity of some Biblical stories (e.g. the creation of Eve from Adam's rib) into doubt. Given that principle, it is obvious that the religious leaders would choose to suppress the practice.
* The men who opposed inoculation and vaccination had nothing to gain personally from preventing these medical techniques from reaching the public. As human beings, they would have surely felt the pain of seeing so many people die. Their arguments were entirely theological and, I might add, based on a consistent reading and understanding of the Bible. If the prerogative for inflicting diseases and for curing them is with God (which clearly is the case as we have seen above) then trying to prevent diseases would be like trying to thwart the will of God.
* Finally in the case of the provision of anesthetics to women in labor, the argument was again theological. If God has placed the pain upon Eve as a punishment, men should not be "playing God" to remove that curse. The pain of childbirth, according to this theologically informed view, was not an "evil" that should be alleviated, but a from of suffering to be humbly accepted by women as a reminder of the original sin against God. Again absent this theological view, everyone involved would have had no reason to denounce this advance.
It bears reiterating that these attempts to stop the saving knowledge of medicine was not done by evil men who were bent on using religion for whatever "evil ends" they have. These acts at suppressing medical advances, causing thousands of needless deaths and untold suffering, were done by men of conviction [c] - misguided men no doubt, but men of conviction nevertheless - men who believed they were doing God's work in opposing medical science. Thus the "evil" lies primarily not in the men themselves but in the theological system that made them blind towards all suffering around them.
Thanks to the relentless fight by scientists and enlightened people in the past we find such theological defenses quaint. For we see clearly the benefits these advances in medicine have brought to all. However it must be remembered that there is a new front of theological attack on medicine and the life sciences. The current theologically based opposition to embryonic stem cell research, cloning, in-vitro fertilization and genetic engineering are based on the same logic that had been the cause of misery in the past.
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Notes
a. Which was to be the main claim to fame of William Harvey (1578-1657).
b. Strictly speaking, Jenner did not "discover" vaccination. Anecdotal tales of how milkmaids infected with cowpox never came down with smallpox later were known for some time prior to his work (his first vaccination of in 1796). Furthermore the use of cowpox inoculations to prevent smallpox was done by two other people earlier: an English farmer, Benjamin Jesty in 1774 and a tutor Peter Plett in 1791. However Jenner was the first to publish his observations and early experiments and is normally credited with its discovery. [32]
c. Its amazing how easily people are impressed by the credential of someone who is labelled as a "man of conviction" - as the recent election results in the US shows. Yet a "man of conviction" who reached his convictions via an unexamined faith (and with little curiosity for continually testing their correctness) is no different from a closed minded bigot. As the above examples show, it was "men of conviction" who had consistently inflicted harm on people by fighting these medical advances. |
