Abstract
Skepticism toward infant pain characterized much of 20th century research and clinical
practice, with infant surgery routinely conducted with minimal or no anesthesia into
the 1980s. This paper offers a historical exploration of how this view became common
by reviewing and analyzing the experimental infant pain research of the 19th and early
20th centuries that contributed to the development of infant pain denial. These experiments
used pinprick and electric shock, and the results were generally interpreted as evidence
of infants’ underdeveloped pain perception, attributed to their lack of brain maturation.
Even clear responses to noxious stimuli were often dismissed as reflex responding.
Later these experimental findings were used by anesthesiologists to support the lessened
use of anesthesia for infants. Based on the reviewed literature, this paper suggests
that 4 interrelated causes contributed to the denial of infant pain: the Darwinian
view of the child as a lower being, extreme experimental caution, the mechanistic
behaviorist perspective, and an increasing emphasis on brain and nervous system development.
Ultimately this history can be read as a caution to modern researchers to be aware
of their own biases, the risks of null hypothesis testing, and a purely mechanistic
view of infants.
Perspective
This article reviews the history of 19th and early 20th century infant pain research,
tracing how the widely accepted belief that infants could not feel pain developed
in the period prior to the growing acceptance of infant pain. Four interrelated causes
are posited to help explain the tolerance of infant pain denial until recent times.
Key words
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Article info
Footnotes
Work was funded by a Canadian Institutes of Health Research New Investigator Award to Rebecca Pillai Riddell.
There were no conflicts of interest related to this research.
Identification
Copyright
© 2013 American Pain Society. Published by Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
