The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World

by Iain McGilchrist

I was shocked to learn from an anaesthetist during my medical training that human infants were operated on well into the 1980s without anaesthetics, because, unable to verbalise their pain, they were clearly not capable of feeling it.203 Their screams and cries were like those of animals, creakings of a machine. This practice was perpetuated, and given credence, by an influential paper by the psychologist Myrtle McGraw, published in 1941, which promoted the idea that infants do not experience pain.204 It was not until 1987 that the American Academy of Pediatrics issued a declaration that it was no longer ethical to perform surgery on preterm babies without anaesthetics;