According to traditional Christian theology, human beings have fallen from divine grace. Satan tempted Adam and Eve to defy the command of God not to eat of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Eve disobeyed. Original Sin was born. All descendants of Adam and Eve have fallen from a blissful state of innocence and communion with God.

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.