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Can Babies Remember Pain?

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06.01.2025

You may find this hard to believe, but up until the 1990s, infants were routinely subjected to medical procedures, including surgery, without the benefit of anesthesia.

Pain research’s most famous infant, Jeffrey Lawson, was born prematurely in February 1985 and underwent open heart surgery shortly thereafter.1 What made this particular surgery noteworthy was the fact that Jeffery was awake and conscious throughout the entire procedure. The anesthesiologist had administered only Pavulon, a paralytic that has no effect on pain.

Only after Jeffrey died five weeks later did his mother, Jill, learn the truth about his surgery. Jeffrey had been too young to tolerate anesthesia, the anesthesiologist said, and anyway, “It had never been demonstrated to her that premature babies feel pain."1 This was not the case of a rogue anesthesiologist; textbooks at the time taught that the surgery Jeffrey underwent “could be safely accomplished with only oxygen and a paralytic.”

Not until a research report from Anand and Hickey, “Pain and Its Effects in the Human Neonate and Fetus,” was published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 1987 did this practice finally begin to end.

Similar to the denial of infant physiological pain has been the denial of psychic pain, including the pain of separation in infancy and childhood. Until the 1970s, infants and children who were hospitalized were denied visitation by their parents.

The need for parental love and care and the pain that children suffer without this were considered unimportant in the physical recovery process—and the attachment needs of the young child went completely unrecognized in medical circles.

Even now, some question whether trauma and/or loss occurring in the early months and years of life........

© Psychology Today