To-day in South Africa the same spirit is seen. Honest countryfolk of European descent are earnestly counselled by their spiritual advisers to submit patiently to the plague of locusts on the ground that it comes as a punishment from Providence. These worthy men stolidly witness their cornfields and their grass lands being eaten bare before their eyes in a few hours, whilst their more enlightened neighbours, brought up in another faith, resort with success to 125 all sorts of artifices to ward off the destructive little invaders.
It is pleasant to be able to record that Dr. Chalmers, one of the heroes of Scots religious history, not only countenanced chloroform by witnessing operations performed under it in the Royal Infirmary, but when requested to deal in a magazine article with the theological aspect of anæesthesia refused on the ground that the question had no theological aspect, and advised Simpson and his friends to take no heed of the “small theologians” who advocated such views. This was futile advice to give to one of Professor Simpson’s controversial propensities; he entered with keen enjoyment into the fray with these “religious” opponents. His famous pamphlet, entitled, “Answer to the Religious Objections advanced against the employment of Anæesthetic Agents in Midwifery and Surgery,” fought his enemies with their own weapons by appealing with consummate skill to Scripture for authority for the practice. The paper was headed with two scriptural verses:—“For every creature of God is good, and nothing to be refused if it be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy iv. 4). “Therefore to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not to him it is sin” (James iv. 17).
The principal standpoint of the religious opponents was the primeval curse upon womanhood to be found in Genesis. Simpson swept the ground from under his opponents’ feet by reference to and study of the original 126 Hebrew text. The word translated—“sorrow” (“I will greatly multiply thy sorrow ... in sorrow shalt thou bring forth”)—was the same as that rendered as “sorrow” in the curse applied to man (“in sorrow shalt thou eat of it all the days of thy life”). Not only did the Hebrew word thus translated sorrow really mean labour, toil, or physical exertion; but in other parts of the Bible an entirely different Hebrew word was used to express the actual pain incident to parturition. The contention, then, that sorrow in the curse meant pain was valueless. Chloroform relieved the real pain not referred to in the curse, whereas it had no effect upon the sorrow or physical exertion.
If, however, the curse was to be taken literally in its application to woman as these persons averred, and granting for the moment that sorrow did mean pain, their position was entirely illogical. If one part of the curse was to be interpreted literally, so must be the other parts, and this would have a serious effect of a revolutionary nature upon man and the human race all over the face of the earth. Literally speaking, the curse condemned the farmer who pulled up his thorns and thistles, as well as the man who used horses or oxen, water-power, or steam-traction to perform the work by which he earned his bread; for was he not thereby saving the sweat of his face?
Pushed further, the same argument rendered these contentions more absurd and untenable. Man was 127 condemned to die—“dust thou art and unto dust thou shalt return.” What right had the physician or surgeon to use his skill to prolong life, at the same time that he conscientiously abstained from the use of anæsthetics on the ground that they obviated pain sent by the Deity? Nay, more; sin itself was the result of the Fall; was not the Church herself erroneously labouring to turn mankind from sin?
In a truer and more serious religious spirit he reminded his foolish opponents of the Christian dispensation, and pointed out how the employment of anæsthesia was in strict consonance with the glorious spirit thereof.
Some persons broadly stated that the new process was unnatural; even these he condescended to answer. “How unnatural,” exclaimed an Irish lady, “for you doctors in Edinburgh to take away the pains of your patients.” “How unnatural,” said he, “it is for you to have swam over from Ireland to Scotland against wind and tide in a steam-boat.”
A son of De Quincey in his graduation thesis humorously supported Professor Simpson. He argued that the unmarried woman who opposed anæsthetics on the ground that her sex was condemned by the curse to suffer pains, broke the command herself “in four several ways, according to the following tabular statement”:—
“1. She has no conception.
2. She brings forth no children. 128
3. Her desire is not to her husband.
4. The husband does not rule over her.”
De Quincey himself supported his son in a letter appended to the thesis thus:—“If pain when carried to the stage which we call agony or intense struggle amongst vital functions brings with it some danger to life, then it will follow that knowingly to reject a means of mitigating or wholly cancelling the danger now that such means has been discovered and tested, travels on the road towards suicide. It is even worse than an ordinary movement in that direction, because it makes God an accomplice, through the Scriptures, in this suicidal movement, nay, the primal instigator to it, by means of a supposed curse interdicting the use of any means whatever (though revealed by Himself) for annulling that curse.”