Twilight Sleep
Datura
(Scopolamine)
Birth
trauma
['Twilight sleep is an amnesic condition characterized by
insensibility to pain without loss of consciousness, induced by an injection of
morphine and scopolamine, especially to relieve the pain of childbirth. This
combination induces a semi-narcotic state which produces the experience of
childbirth without pain, or without the memory of pain. The term 'Twilight
Sleep' is also sometimes used to refer to modern intravenous sedation.'
1]
Quotes
Unless I am mistaken, I believe that the issue of using "Twilight Sleep" was
one of the many horrors of medical practice that Michael Crichton wrote about in
his autobiography, Travels. In case you aren't familiar with that book, Crichton
started out wanting to be a doctor, but what he saw in medical school and his
internship and residency horrified him so that he realized that he could never
morally work as a doctor. He finished medical school so that he could say he had
not quit, but he never practiced medicine and instead, became a filmmaker
(probably the most known for his scripts of "Jurassic Park" and "The Andromeda
Strain". but there many others, as well).
According to Crichton, there was an irony regarding the
Twilight Sleep; women who were in the hospital where he worked as an intern who
were unwed mothers were "punished" by the system by not being given any drugs of
relief at all, which meant that they escaped the Twilight Sleep and therefore
ended up experiencing a more natural birth experience than the "non-punished"
mothers undergoing the horrors of Twilight Sleep, whom he described as elegant
Boston women screaming and swearing like sailors.
By the dates you listed of when this was used, I know that at
least with my birth in 1948 and my sister's birth in 1951, my mother must have
had the Twilight Sleep. She was told after my birth that the birth was so
difficult that the next one would kill her. She went on to have three more
children, although the third one in 1954 and the fourth one in 1960 were
Caesarian births. They surely didn't use Twilight Sleep on Caesarian births, did
they? If so, then they were guilty of performing no worse tortures than the
Japanese did to prisoners in World War II in their unit 731 with its non-anesthetic
medical experimentation war crimes.
Referring back to your wonderful radio show about
hypnotherapy, I would say that every single woman in the United States giving
birth under Twilight Therapy would need to undergo hypnotherapy healing of their
giving-birth traumas. I feel like having that therapy, myself, from simply
having undergone a transesophageal echocardiogram and the subsequent shocks of
electro cardioversion (which corrected my atrial fibrillation for only about a
week before it came back again). They used some kind of "not an anesthetic but
you will forget" drug for that and by the time I was back home after those
procedures, my tongue looked like Shamu the Whale, nearly totally back and
filled up my oral cavity completely. I was driven to the ER in a panic and taken
in right away due what this (different hospital) immediately declared a
life-threatening emergency. The ER doctor said my tongue was so badly
traumatized that combined with the heavy shots of anticoagulant caused me to
bleed heavily into my tongue. I cannot imagine what level of pain, fear, panic,
suffering, and screaming I must have gone through to endure all of that. My
conscious mind may not remember, but SOMETHING does--my subconscious, my body,
my soul, maybe even a portion of my brain. Any system that subjects any patient
to things like that must be pure evil, obviously.
Labor under Twilight Sleep protocols meant that mothers-to-be were drugged and
semi-conscious. The word ‘sleep’ is misleading, as women were in a profound
stupor between contraction and became delirious during them. They frequently
moaned, cried, screamed, occasionally hit or bit nurses, refused to stay
modestly under their covers, often tried to climb out of bed and sometime broke
an arm or chipped a tooth as the fell to the floor. The functional effects of
the drug scopolamine is the temporary equivalent of a frontal lobotomy — all
executive function and all personal inhibitions are inaccessible while under its
influence for as long as 48 hours.
Historically women under the influence of scopolamine were
dressed in special hospital gowns with long sleeves that were sown together in
the middle to make one continuous loop from each arm. This is a very low-tech
yet highly efficient way to achieve the goal of a straight jacket. In many
hospitals also wrapped the mother’s head in a towel to keep her from getting
hurt when she banged her head on the bars of her cribbed.
Other also placed a black hood over the laboring woman’s head
to reduce visual distractions. A photo of this practice is reminiscent of those
that came out of the Abu Garave torture scandal. Then the mother-to-be was was
put in a special adult-sized crib with 4-ft high bars. After being put in this
bed, a removable canvas cover was fastened to the top of the bed to keep drugged
women inside like caged animals.
Women given the drug scopolamine during labor cannot recall
anything afterwards, including the birth of their baby, because the memory was
never formed in the first place. {Note on pharmacology of scopolamine and
memory: Memory formation occurs in 3 stages: encoding (when a new memory is
initially made), storage (the creation of memories) and recall (when memories
are retrieved). N eurotransmitters are bio-chemicals involved in the transfer of
nerve signals. Acetylcholine (ACh) is a cholinergic neurotransmitter that
transfers the electrical signals that encode our memories . Scopolamine has an
anti-cholinergic effect, which means the memory encoding effect of the
acetylcholine is neutralized and no memory formation can occur. Ref –
www.MediAngels.com
Aside ~ ‘The story I hate to tell': 3 decades of slow progress followed by the
slow death of a dream
The National Twilight Sleep Association was formed in order
to support the use of a new maternal anethesiac development begun by a young
obstetrical doctor by the name of Carl Gauss. Around 1900, Gauss combined two
drugs that had been in the medical armament for a long time to treat childbirth
pain. One main component was morphine, used to alleviate pain during surgery. It
had, thus far, been avoided in obstetrics because of its effect on the uterus,
its effect on the newborn, and its effects on bleeding and infection. The other
drug was scopolamine, which causes amnesia - in the past, these had been used as
poisons in high doses. Hamlet's father was killed by one of scopolamine's
cousins.
Gauss mixed these two drugs and administered them in 'small
doses' to his patients - the morphine provided relief from pain while the
scopolamine provided the women with amnesia of their labors and what was done to
them. The problems? Oh, there are many!!! Scopolamine caused women to lose their
inhibitions. They would have no memory of what went on, nor did they realize
what was happening, so most of them screamed during labor. They became
uninhibited and psychotic. They would thrash about on the bed, causing injuries
to their heads. So, their heads were wrapped with blankets or towels,
turban-like. They would attempt to claw at the walls or their medical providers,
so they were put in straight jackets or their wrists were strapped to the beds.
Then, so that they would not fall out of bed, they were put in 'labor cribs' -
and were allowed to labor, screaming, tied down, blinded and bound - often in
their own urine and feces, and sometimes for days on end, until it was time to
birth. The women had no memory of this, the husbands were not allowed in to see
their wives, so they didn't know what was happening - and everyone was happy.
Gausses concoction was tried out first in Europe and was
found to be less than satisfactory for maternal care. It would probably have
died out there had it not been for an infamous article in McClure's magazine.
Two female reporter's who were also staunch feminists, accompanied their friend
to Germany, where she was traveling to be 'treated by Dr. Gauss'. The woman was
administered Twilight Sleep and was ecstatic with it. She simply woke to a baby
- with no memory of the labor or birth. The three women decided to liberate
American women through Twilight Sleep.
Every woman wanted to have that type of birth. Medical
research was not sought as to the safety, and feminist drive demanded quick
results. So - the U.S. because predominantly a Twilight nation between the years
of 1914-1945 (although my grandmother recounts her story of TS in 1956 and there
are reports as late as the 1980's).
Thankfully (and sadly because of what it took) this time in
American history quickly collapsed when Frances Carmody died under Twilight
Sleep. Although there had been numerous women who had died under Twilight Sleep,
she was the wife of a Brooklyn lawyer and happened to also be a huge rally
organizer for the Twilight Sleep Campaign. Her husband and her OB assured
everyone that her death had nothing to do with Twilight Sleep, but, with a key
organizer gone from the game, at the very time she was using something she was
promoting, the campaign began to fall apart.
http://wonderfullymadebelliesandbabies.blogspot.co.uk/2007/12/quick-history-of-medication-in-maternal.html