FREE NEJM E-TOC    HOME   |   SUBSCRIBE   |   CURRENT ISSUE   |   PAST ISSUES   |   COLLECTIONS   |   Search Term  Advanced Search

Sign in | Get NEJM's E-Mail Table of Contents — Free | Subscribe

Previous Volume 343:1276-1277 October 26, 2000 Number 17

	Since this article has no abstract, we have provided an extract of the first 100 words of the full text and any section headings.

	Full Text Purchase this article Add to Personal Archive Add to Citation Manager Notify a Friend E-mail When Cited

By Donald Caton. 304 pp. New Haven, Conn., Yale University Press, 1999. $30. ISBN 0-300-07597-9.

From biblical verses to Homer's "sharp sorrow of pain" to Sylvia Plath's "long, blind, doorless and windowless corridor of pain," chroniclers, poets, and novelists have recounted the suffering of women in childbirth. Physicians, midwives, and others who have helped women through labor and delivery have also witnessed their pain, and throughout history many of them tried to relieve the suffering. In the 19th century, the demonstration of the efficacy of ether in relieving the pain of surgery led physicians to start using ether, chloroform, and then other agents to relieve the agonies of childbirth.

Donald Caton is an academic physician . . . [Full Text of this Article]

HOME  |  SUBSCRIBE  |  SEARCH  |  CURRENT ISSUE  |  PAST ISSUES  |  COLLECTIONS  |  PRIVACY  |  TERMS OF USE  |  HELP  |  beta.nejm.org Comments and questions? Please contact us. The New England Journal of Medicine is owned, published, and copyrighted © 2009 Massachusetts Medical Society. All rights reserved.