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

The average rating for What a Blessing She Had Chloroform: The Medical and Social Response to the Pain of Childbirth from 1800 to the Present based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-04-05 00:00:00 Fawad Khan 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.)

Review # 2 was written on 2007-05-20 00:00:00 James Whitley 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.