Giving birth is a difficult process, but in the not too distant past it was much more difficult and worse.
Before proper pain relief, caesarean section, and antiseptics were introduced, there were infections and home births, severe pain, and chainsaws used to enlarge the mother-to-be, if lucky, her pelvis.
So when doctors in Germany promise patients that they can soothe pain and erase memories of their experience, it’s easy to see how popular this practice özgü become.
In 1906, obstetricians Bernhardt Kronig and Karl Gauss came up with the idea of giving scopolamine and morphine drugs to aid in childbirth.
While morphine reduces pain, scopolamine, a component of herbs in the nightshade family, causes drowsiness, memory loss, and euphoria.
Euphoria, or euphoria, is a state of mind in which a person feels contented and well-off. In psychiatry, euphoria always özgü a pathological meaning and is often an important early symptom of organic cerebral disease.
The idea was that they gave the patient enough of the two drugs and reduced pain, as well as giving them a complete memory loss later on.
Satisfied with their trials as they show fewer complications than natural birth, Kronig and Gauss began offering the drug combination to patients at the Baden State University Women’s Clinic in Baden, Germany.
In 1907 Gauss was giving this to all his pregnant patients. Rumors began to spread that treatment was exaggerated as the end of the labor pain, and soon women began traveling from America to Germany to give birth in a “Twilight Sleep” state.
Thousands of mothers were satisfied with the results and stated that they had a painless birth. Some had more babies under the same procedure. On the outside, it sounded too good to be true. And it was.
When patients first started experiencing labor pains, Gauss gave them a dose of morphine and scopolamine. From then on, they would only be given scopolamine doses.
While this prevented them from remembering the pain, it in no way prevented them from feeling.
They had to imprison women in their beds. They tried to prevent them from injuring themselves and others by using flat cloths or straps on their arms and legs, bandaging their eyes and putting cotton in their ears.
The screams were also a pretty big clue that the process wasn’t as painless as the women remembered.
Dr Henry Smith Williams wrote in 1914, “The mother may seem conscious of the birth of her child and suffer obviously.” “But after a few minutes, when the baby is brought from the next room by the nurse and placed in the mother’s arms, the patient does not recognize the child as his own child or does not realize that he is alive yet,” he said.
However, the method reached as far as the United States across the Atlantic largely due to high demand from the mothers themselves. There were additional dangers here due to the way the drugs were administered.
In Germany, patients were methodically evaluated for dosage prior to administration of drugs, in America this was not the case. While complementary doses were given according to the needs of the patients in Germany, they were given at regular intervals by dividing the doses in the USA.
“The baby was pinkish lavender and did not breathe for about ten minutes,” Dr Stella Lehr wrote about a birth she witnessed in 1915. “During this time various methods of resuscitation were used: the baby was hung by his feet and his body was vigorously slapped, then he was laid on a table and a CPR; Then the body was alternately immersed in hot and cold water, and finally, intratracheal catheterization was performed. he stated.
“After witnessing this, I naturally decided that twilight sleep should be used very carefully, or, better still, not used at all.” said.
The demand for the procedure is understandable given the pain relief available at the time. He left the qualified and careful working doctors far behind, and the task of administering the doses was usually left to nurses with insufficient training.
Given that drugs can cross the placenta, this could result in babies being unable to breathe healthy, which would probably not happen at düzgüsel birth.
The demand for Twilight Sleep declined after Francis Carmody died in childbirth in 1915, who helped popularize the method in the United States.
This death was caused by a bleeding unrelated to the method, but it still made the practice less popular.
However, twilight sleep was still in use in some areas until the 1960s, until journalists revealed the adverse conditions inside the rooms and the scissor cracks left on the bodies of women struggling against restrictions when drugged.
Compiled by: Feyza ÇETİNKOL
Source: iflscience
/ The Once Popular Birth Method: Twilight Sleep That Deletes Memories /
