Recent discoveries in developmental science show just how cruel that was. And even when children cannot remember the actual experience of pain, it seems to get permanently recorded at a biological level. Doctors now have more liberty to fight children's pain with drugs. Fears of addiction have proved unfounded, although doctors monitor a child's vital signs carefully when using sedatives such as morphine or fentanyl. And better drugs have joined the arsenal.
Drugs are far from the only answer, however.
Leora Kuttner, a psychologist at British Columbia's Children's Hospital in Vancouver, has spent her career proving the value of such techniques as distraction, hypnosis, meditation, controlled breathing, and fantasy to ease pain during medical procedures. When she was about 7, she met Kuttner and became part of a pain control study. Her mother, Ann, remembers how it was at first. The children would yell and kick and be reduced to tears. Everybody's stomach would be in a knot.