Dr.
Jacqueline Wolf tells history,
hazards of obstetric anesthesia
OU-HCOM historian of medicine
publishes new book,
Deliver Me From Pain
By Anita Martin
March 9, 2009
Practices in childbirth are driven
less by medical innovation and more
by socio-cultural forces—sometimes
to the detriment of mothers and
their babies, writes Jacqueline
H. Wolf, Ph.D., in Deliver Me
from Pain: Anesthesia and Birth in
America. The book, published
this month by The Johns Hopkins
University Press, examines the
development of, and
common misconceptions surrounding,
one obstetric practice: anesthesia.
In Deliver Me from Pain,
Wolf, professor of social
medicine, describes how obstetric
anesthesia came to calm women’s
anxiety about
birth despite the medical risks it
posed to mothers and newborns.
As obstetric anesthesia first became
common in the early 20th
century, the maternal death rate
began to rise, in part because
anesthetized women who could not
push on their own required forceps,
which increased the chances
of postpartum infections. Through
the 1960s, mothers were frequently
anesthetized to the point of
unconsciousness, usually during the
second,
less painful stage of labor—often
just as the baby was being born.
“I wanted to understand why so many
women were rendered lethargic, or
even unconscious, during one of the
most salient moments of their
lives,”
Wolf says.
Wolf argues that the popularity of
obstetric anesthesia, based on its
perceived “convenience,” helped
drive public approval of subsequent,
often unnecessary—and sometimes
dangerous—treatments. These include
forceps, labor induction, episiotomy,
electronic fetal monitoring and,
most recently, Cesarean section,
which studies have linked to the
recent rise of the maternal
mortality rate in the United
States—the first such rise in more
than
70 years.
As American women make decisions
about anesthesia today, Deliver
Me from Pain offers insight into
how women made this choice in the
past and why each generation of
mothers has made dramatically
different decisions.
Wolf is the author of Don’t Kill
Your Baby: Public Health and the
Decline of Breastfeeding in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
and the host of Health Vision,
a weekly show on contemporary health
and medicine airing on the PBS
affiliate in Southeast Ohio. She has
already begun work on her third
book, about the history of Cesarean
sections in the United States.
