(See front cover)
More than 2,000,000 U. S. babies will be born to less than 2,000,000 U. S. women during 1936. The majority of births will occur in the mothers' own homes and in their own beds. Most of the confinements will be attended by some 100,000 "family" physicians few of whom saw more than twelve deliveries while at medical school. These all-round doctors learned practical obstetrics mostly by watching Nature take its course with pregnant women. To them childbirth is a welcome commonplace which provides income of $50 to $150 per case. To the average U. S. family it is an economic and emotional problem which occurs two or three times in a life span. To every nubile woman it still evokes the Lord's words to sinful Eve: "I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception. In sorrow thou shall bring forth children."
The oldest Egyptian mummy known is a pregnant woman. After her gravid body was dried and bandaged, 4,600 years ago, her husband encased her in a tomb which was opened only last month. Ancient doctors used forceps (which killed the baby) and performed Caesarean sections (which killed the mother) in cases of difficult delivery. Hindus today often put a brazier of hot charcoal under the maternity bed to assist Nature. More primitive obstetricians help by jumping up & down on the pregnant woman's abdomen.
Concern over the mothers' comfort during confinement and health thereafter is a phenomenon so utterly modern that it caused a great splatter of headlines in the lay Press at the meeting of the American Medical Association in Kansas City last week (see p. 42).
First doctor to soothe the pains of child-birth was Dr. James Young Simpson (1811-70) of Edinburgh. In 1847 he used chloroform. Doctors and ministers denounced him for interfering with God's will. Dr. Simpson persisted and died rich, knighted and famed. In 1913 Drs. Bernard Kronig & Carl J. Gauss of Freiburg, Germany, invented twilight sleep, which they induced by injecting a combination of morphine and scopolamine into a woman who was about to have a baby. Lapsing into a dreamy state, the mother knows what is going on but feels little, gives no wilful assistance to Nature. In 1923 Dr. James Taylor Gwathmey of Manhattan proposed another combination of drugs for "synergistic anesthesia." He produced drowsiness and anesthesia by injecting morphine and epsom salts into the mother's muscles, quinine, alcohol and ether in olive oil into the rectum.
Last week at the A. M. A. convention forward-looking obstetricians reviewec
Krönig-Gauss twilight sleep and Gwathmey synergy and proposed other combinations of drugs to dull labor's pangs. The doctors who rendered reports were enthusiastic about results.
Their enthusiasm provoked Dr. Gertrude Siegmond Nielsen, 41, Norman, Okla. child specialist, wife of a University of Oklahoma physicist and mother of three, to pop up at an A. M. A. section meeting and cry: "Child bearing is so essential an experience for a woman that the thwarting of its normal course by the excessive use of analgesics may cause great damage to her personality. If she is carried through delivery in an unconscious state, she is deprived of the experience of giving birth to her child and in some cases will pay for this escape from reality by nervous disorders.