Objections to Anesthesia

As we talked and read about the resistance to anesthesia, I was especially surprised by the concern that removing another person’s physical sensations was morally wrong (aside from the Biblically based concern that women ought to experience Eve’s postlapsarian sufferings during childbirth). One doctor mentioned in class wrote that giving anesthesia, disconnecting a patient from his body, was a serious invasion of another’s agency. Though I would be happy relinquish my right to feel pain during a surgery, I think that this nineteenth century concern of a loss in patients’ involvement in their own diseases and treatments is supported in other ways. Advances in diagnosis, especially using tools like a stethoscope or a sphygmomanometer, were more objective but also lessened the importance of the patient’s own account. Earlier in the nineteenth century, doctors used the patient’s story of his illness to recommend treatment. Later, a doctor was more likely to depend on his examination of palpation and auscultation, classify the patient as an example of a particular disease, and prescribe, thus emphasizing the disease over the patient. Anesthesia was one step further, not only discounting a patient’s knowledge of his body but removing the link between a patient and his body entirely. The physical dangers of anesthesia, though, prompted most concerns, as Martin Pernick explains in “The Calculus of Suffering.” Many doctors in the nineteenth century refused to use anesthetics because there was a chance it could harm their patient. The line between safety and comfort has shifted since the nineteenth century; anesthesia is now the most dangerous part of many surgeries, but there’s no question of withholding it for the sake of safety, and certainly not for patients’ right to physical sensations.