History
| “ | The primal curse, "I will greatly multiply the sorrow of your conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children," was to be finally abrogated. The bearing of a child was henceforth to be merely a time of twilight and of sleep. | ” |
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—Twilight Sleep: the Dämmerschlaf of the Germans, The Canadian Medical Association Journal |
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Developed in Freiburg, Germany, twilight sleep replaced chloroform, the previous treatment for childbirth pains popular during the 1800s. Developed by Carl Gauss, who began research on the treatment in 1903, it was also sometimes known as the "Freiburg method". However, Gauss was not the first to suggest the use of the combination of morphine and scopolamine as a surgical anesthesia; in 1899, a Dr. Schneiderlin "recommended the use of scopolamine, combined with morphia, for the production of surgical anaesthesia".
Though introduced to the rest of the medical community in 1907, as of 1915, The Canadian Medical Association Journal reported that "the method really still in a state of development", noting of many substitutions that different doctors had used in the place of morphine or scopolamine.
In 1915, the New York Times published an article on twilight sleep and the work of Hanna Rion, or Mrs. Frank Ver Beck, who had recently written a book entitled The Truth About Twilight Sleep. In that article, Rion said that the consensus of 69 medical reports she had looked at said that "scopolamin-morphin is without danger to the child."
This consensus would eventually change as the negative side effects of twilight sleep came to light.
Read more about this topic: Twilight Sleep
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history we make today.”
—Henry Ford (1863–1947)
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)