Since we have inherited Adam and Eve's guilt, albeit by a somewhat obscure mechanism, we are condemned to a life of suffering and toil ("the primal curse"), whether in seeking food or - in the case of women - giving birth. So the mid-19th century revolution in surgical and obstetric anaesthesia struck religious traditionalists as a challenge to the divine order of things. Biblical literalists held that use of anaesthetics to abolish pain was unnatural - as indeed is civilisation itself.