Yesterday, I was rendered unconscious by intravenous administration of a drug called Propofol. The oddest thing about it is that I can remember every detail except the moment it was administered. No memory of what it felt like, no "drifting off," nothing like that. The IV line had been set up and was flowing, and I remember the anesthetist telling me they were going to give it to me, but then it's just a big blank until I woke up (a little less than an hour later). So it's more than just an anesthetic; it seems to either prevent or wipe out the laying down of any memory relating to the way it feels. So, not only did I feel no pain, I did not feel the effect of the drug which blocked it. When I woke up, there I was, apparently clear-headed, but with no memory beyond lying down with the IV in me.

There was a time -- not all that long ago -- when not feeling pain was considered immoral. But anesthesia, by introducing the concept of not having to feel pain, changed the concept.

Some argue that it went from being a spiritual to a political issue. From an abstract of a article titled "The Secularization of Pain":

The rapid acceptance of anesthesia in 1846 appears to have had a political and social basis as well as medical. Two factors are particularly important. First was a change in the perception of disease and pain; both lost religious connotations and became biologic phenomena as part of a process of secularization that affected all aspects of Western society. Second was the growth of a sense of well-being and progress, which imbued patients and physicians alike with confidence in their ability to control natural processes. During the last half century, pain has remained secular, but the confidence in both progress and the ability to control nature may have diminished.

Conquering pain is one thing, but conquering death -- in many ways the ultimate reach in our ability to control nature -- still eludes science.

Of course, when nature can be controlled, a debate ensues over who gets to be in control of the controllers.

Why would the ability to avoid pain have been seen as immoral by Victorian moralists? Were they simply wrong? Or were the pain avoiders wrong according to the morality of the times? It's easy for us to dismiss out of hand the argument that short-circuiting pain constitutes "playing God," but in religious terms, isn't that precisely what is going on? Pain is as much a part of nature as death, and the human ability to eliminate it takes nature out of the equation, and puts man in charge. For those who believe nature is God, anesthesia gets between the individual and what God would seem to have ordained.

Little wonder that the power to control pain would be so strictly controlled. The word "secularization" is a bit misleading in this context.

"State takeover" is more like it, for it's as if taking God out of pain meant putting the state in control.

Or is "secular" coming to mean statism?