Thus, in the earlier period, many people would come to a long-term amputee for prayer and spiritual counsel (41). But the widespread use of anesthesia by the 1870s “made passive acceptance of suffering seem not only needless, but sometimes even pathological” (15). Cf. this emphasis on accepting suffering also in the 1700s (Kidd, “Healing,” 165). Against the propaganda circulated by prominent nineteenth-century polemicists, hostility toward anesthesia was driven by physicians rather than clergy (Schoepflin, “Anesthesia,” 129).
