Article Summary by Eleanor Taylor

1847 was a momentous year in the history obstetric anaesthetic, as well as the history of medicine, with James Young Simpson’s discovery of the anaesthetic properties of chloroform. For the next fifty years, chloroform was the anaesthetic of choice. However, in the early 1900s, a new method of obstetric pain relief gained popularity, a mixture of scopolamine and morphine, more commonly referred to as ‘twilight sleep’. The method was originally developed in Germany and its impact in America has been studied by various historians. My paper focuses on the use and impact of twilight sleep in Britain, demonstrating that, although neglected, it was an important episode in the history of obstetric pain relief in Britain, as well as America. While researching the subject, I came across a newspaper campaign during 1916 in the Weekly Dispatch, consisting of a series of weekly articles written by Hanna Rion, advocating for the use of twilight sleep. Through studying the twilight sleep campaign we see how women began to see themselves as consumers and shape medical practice, before the natural childbirth movement, which it has traditionally been attributed to. Therefore, twilight sleep provides us with the missing link in the story of obstetric anaesthetics, between the discovery of chloroform in 1847 and the natural childbirth movement in the 1930s.

Read the full article on the Medical Humanities journal website.

I am currently a medical student at the University of Cambridge. During my third year of the course, known as the ‘intercalated’ year, I read the history and philosophy of science. During this year, I developed a particular interest in the history of obstetrics and wrote my dissertation on the subject of twilight sleep.