“God was the first anaesthetist”: obstetrics and pain in Lisbon at the turn of the 20th century

Abstract

In this article, I analyse the historical emergence of pain management in obstetric literature and practice and how it affected the constitution of a new epistemology of obstetrics in Portugal. The text draws largely on archival research on biomedical articles and theses from mid-19th up to early-20th-century Lisbon, revealing an emerging and shifting biomedical understanding of pain and the labouring body, the agency of the obstetrician, and the political role of obstetrics. The research is part of a longitudinal anthropological study of childbirth pain approached as a locus where affectivities, shifting ontologies and biopolitics merge. Rather than considering childbirth pain as a taken-for-granted physical phenomenon, its materialization within the specific biomedical and historical context of Portugal at the turn of the 20th century is analysed.