Dr Richard Knight, retired anaesthetist discusses his personal experience of obstetric anaesthesia and how the practice has progressed over the last 50 years.
Two prefixes separate the same procedure: peridural in French means epidural in English. Physiologically, the French word is the more accurate.
Our first child arrived in 1968, delivered in a London hospital. My wife was nominally under the care of a consultant, but in reality the obstetric senior registrar oversaw her delivery.
She had attended antenatal classes, and was primed to request analgesia when her contractions became distressing. Entonox was a non-starter for her – she had an ether-induction for a childhood tonsillectomy and had retained a terror of an anaesthetic mask being placed on her face ever since.