I have been reading Richard Holmes’ Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science, which describes a number of enlightenment era scientific escapades from the standpoint of the inventors and scientists themselves. One of the major scientific figures of this era was Humphry Davy, a British chemist/inventor. Amongst other things, Davy was the first person to discover the effects of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) on human beings. He spent months inhaling it himself and testing it on others in order to determine whether it could be used in some kind of therapeutic capacity. One of the effects he observed was that it could numb pain. He noted this in a scientific publication, and noted its potential usage in the context of surgery, which in those days was conducted without anesthetics. (For a description of what an anesthetic-free surgery is like, see Fanny Burney’s account of her own mastectomy - if you have the stomach for it.)

But, as Holmes relates, nobody picked up and ran with Davy’s discovery, and Davy himself went on to other scientific matters, never to return to it. Meanwhile drug-free surgeries proceeded for another forty years (!), until 1844 when an American dentist successfully employed it.

Why was it that nobody picked up and ran with the connection between nitrous oxide and pain-free surgery? One reason was that nitrous oxide caused people to laugh and become slightly uncontrollable, presenting difficulties for the surgical procedure. Another, more interesting reason that Holmes relates is this: “Several scholars suggest a ‘cultural’ as much as a technical inhibition. They argue that the late-eighteenth-century attitude to pain, in a surgical context, did not admit to the concept of a ‘pain-free’ operation. Pain itself was a natural and intrinsic part of the surgical procedure, and a surgeon’s ability to handle a patient’s pain – through his imposed psychological authority, his dexterity, and above all his sheer speed of amputation and extraction – was an essential part of his profession. In a word, there was the need for a ‘paradigm shift’ to conceive of pain-free surgery.”

In other words, surgery was painful by cultural definition, and doctors and scientists at the time were unable to escape from this definition. In the depth psychology space, one way to describe this kind of phenomenon is a “concretization”: a fixed or concrete pattern of thought that refuses to bend, and thus kills our ability to be open, flexible, and receptive to the self-organizing dynamics of Nature (see Robert Aziz’s Syndetic Paradigm, p.264). Concretizations, according to Aziz, can arise from a number of different sources, including social norms, which is what Holmes suggests happened in the case of nitrous oxide and pain-free surgery – at least in part. I say “at least in part” because Holmes also implies that another source of this concretization was the surgeons’ ego. A surgeon’s skills, at the time, were rated on how fast he could cut, amputate, and hold an authoritative presence in the face of a screaming patient. To undermine these skills would be to undermine his sense of certainty about himself and his abilities.

What concretizations do we hold in the computer programming profession? One that immediately comes to mind is the idea of a “hardcore programmer,” the commonly held conception of what a good programmer should be. A hardcore programmer spends all day and night working in a dark lonely place, hammering out code, sacrificing nearly every aspect of his or her life towards this end. It is a concretization which provides little wiggle room for “self-organizing Nature” to operate in, and kills one’s ability to pursue a healthy career.

Unfortunately, numerous undergraduate computer science programs perpetuate this concretization by assigning insane amounts of work. This, I think, is something computer science students should keep in mind as they consider how many classes to take at once. As with the prospect of nitrous oxide in the context of surgery, it could reduce unnecessary pain.