Queen Victoria (1819-1901) of Great Britain had a total of nine children. She delivered her first seven by natural childbirth without resort to the new-fangled invention of anesthesia. For her eighth delivery in 1853, she was ready to eschew much of the pain and agreed to the use of chloroform during the procedure. Happy with the results, she repeated the process for her ninth and final child.
Even more so than today, every action of the monarch was subject to the intense scrutiny and comments of the public. The leading journal for physicians in the country, The Lancet, decried the use of anesthesia as medically inappropriate for childbirth. Clergymen all over the country advised that the procedure violated God's intention that women suffer pain as a result of the acts of Eve, as revealed by Genesis 3;16, which stated, "Unto the woman He said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee."
However, in the 19th Century, most physicians and clergymen were males. The females of the population thought that what their Queen had done was really cool, and childbirth under anesthesia in industrial societies quickly became the standard procedure (at least for those who could afford it) until the natural childbirth movement emerged in the mid-20th Century.
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