Sir James Young Simpson: pioneer of anaesthesia in childbirth.

This year is the 150th anniversary of James Young Simpson's death in 1870. As well as being responsible for the introduction of general anaesthesia into obstetric practice, he made other important contributions to obstetrics and also to surgery as well as in the control of hospital infection.

The politics of female pain: women's citizenship, twilight sleep and the early birth control movement.

The medical intervention of 'twilight sleep', or the use of a scopolamine-morphine mixture to anaesthetise labouring women, caused a furore among doctors and early 20th-century feminists. Suffragists and women's rights advocates led the Twilight Sleep Association in a quest to encourage doctors and their female patients to widely embrace the practice. Activists felt the method revolutionised the notoriously dangerous and painful childbirth process for women, touting its benefits as the key to allowing women to control their birth experience at a time when the maternal mortality rate remained high despite medical advances in obstetrics. Yet many physicians attacked the practice as dangerous for patients and their babies and antithetical to the expectations for proper womanhood and motherly duty. Historians of women's health have rightly cited Twilight Sleep as the beginning of the medicalisation and depersonalisation of the childbirth process in the 20th century. This article instead repositions the feminist political arguments for the method as an important precursor for the rhetoric of the early birth control movement, led by Mary Ware Dennett (a former leader in the Twilight Sleep Association) and Margaret Sanger. Both Twilight Sleep and the birth control movement represent a distinct moment in the early 20th century wherein pain was deeply connected to politics and the rhetoric of equal rights. The two reformers emphasised in their publications and appeals to the public the vast social significance of reproductive pain-both physical and psychological. They contended that women's lack of control over both pregnancy and birth represented the greatest hindrance to women's fulfilment of their political rights and a danger to the healthy development of larger society. In their arguments for legal contraception, Dennett and Sanger placed women's pain front and centre as the primary reason for changing a law that hindered women's full participation in the public order.

An Early History of Anesthesia in Labor.

Fear of pain often overshadows childbirth, and each woman must decide whether to receive anesthesia to combat labor pain. Historically, this choice resulted in unintended consequences and marked the beginnings of medical interventions in labor and birth. The purpose of this article is to trace the use of anesthesia in childbirth from the mid-19th to the mid-20th centuries and to explore its influence on childbearing women and nurses.

High-Society Framing: The Brooklyn Eagle and the Popularity of Twilight Sleep in Brooklyn.

Twilight Sleep (TS) is an obstetric intervention during which a laboring woman enters a semiconscious state via injection. TS received enthusiastic support in Brooklyn, NY, in The Brooklyn Eagle (TBE) newspaper between 1914 and 1918. The purpose of this article is to analyze the framing of TS in TBE as the most popular obstetric intervention among wealthy, White socialites in Brooklyn during the period. The coverage in TBE prompted a nearly universally positive perception of TS among the newspaper's wider readership. After extensive historiographical research and rhetorical analysis of newspaper coverage of TS in TBE, we discovered a form of framing we call "high-society framing," rooted in both wealth and notoriety. We discuss four possible effects of high-society framing: The first is the ability of high-society framing to attract or repel the public regarding a health care issue, and the second is the impact of high-society framing on public perception of medical interventions, procedures, or pharmaceuticals. A third possible effect of high-society framing is that it can alter notions of necessity, and a fourth is that high-society framing can elicit a tacit acceptance of medical interventions, procedures, and pharmaceuticals, thus obfuscating risk. Finally, we argue that high-society framing has implications for the discussion of health care in present-day mediated discourses.

The Historical Development of Obstetric Anesthesia and Its Contributions to Perinatology.

Scottish obstetrician James Young Simpson first introduced the use of ether and chloroform anesthesia for labor in 1847, just 1 year after William Morton's first successful public demonstration of ether anesthesia at the Massachusetts General Hospital. The contemporaneous development of surgical anesthesia and obstetrics enabled obstetric anesthesia to address the pain of childbirth. Shortly after its introduction, obstetricians raised concerns regarding placental transport, or the idea that drugs not only crossed the placenta, but exerted detrimental effects on the neonate. The development of regional anesthesia and clinical work in obstetric anesthesia and perinatology addressed issues of the safety of the neonate, enabling obstetric anesthesia to safely and dramatically reduce the pain of childbirth.

Obstetric and Other Uses of Ether Before Ether Day, According to the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal of 1828-1846.

From the inception of the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal in 1828 until the prominent public demonstration of surgical anesthesia on Ether Day of 1846, ether was often mentioned in the journal. Many of the examples were related to obstetrics. Because molecular structures were not available in the early 1800s, diverse volatile liquids were termed ethers. In addition to sulphuric ether, so-called ethers included cyanide-releasing propionitrile and ethanolic solutions of chloroform and of the potent vasodilator ethyl nitrite. Familiarity with anesthetically unsuitable ethers may have long deterred consideration of inhaled sulphuric ether for analgesia and anesthesia.

Crawford Williamson Long: The True Pioneer of Surgical Anesthesia.

Anesthesia and analgesia are as old as mankind itself. However, we now know that the true pioneer of surgical anesthesia through inhalation of ether was Doctor Crawford Williamson Long (1815-1878), who endeavored to help his profession and mankind without pursuing any reward or honor. Crawford Williamson Long was a great and beloved American surgeon. He was a well-educated and elegant man with an outstanding personality. Crawford was born in Danielsville, Georgia, in the United States and was the son of James Long and Elizabeth Ware Long. He married Mary Caroline Swain Long and gave birth to 12 children. Long proved the effectiveness of ether after painlessly removing a tumor from the neck. In 1847, a rivalry broke out among Horace Wells, Charles Thomas Jackson, and William Thomas Green Morton for the primacy as regards the discovery of anesthesia. The US Congress offered itself to arbitrate the case of the so called "ether controversy." Finally, a few years after the end of the North American Civil War, while taking care of a patient, Crawford passed away, presumably after suffering a stroke.

[The first Dutch debate on anaesthesia in obstetrics]. / Het eerste Nederlandse debat over anesthesie in de obstetrie.

After the publication of the Dutch medical guideline on pharmacological analgesia during childbirth in 2008, the question of whether pharmacological pain relief should be permissible during labour was hotly debated. This discussion has been going on since the second half of the 19th century when the introduction of ether and chloroform was extensively studied and described in Great Britain. This article looks back on the same debate in the Netherlands when inhalational anaesthetics were introduced into obstetrics. Study of historical journals and textbooks, originating in the Netherlands and elsewhere, and of historical medical literature on anaesthesia and obstetrics shows that the Dutch protagonists adopted more nuanced ideas on this issue than many of their foreign colleagues. This description of the first Dutch debate on anaesthesia in obstetrics shows that in fact the issues and arguments are timeless.

Technical Versus Public Spheres: A Feminist Analysis of Women's Rhetoric in the Twilight Sleep Debates of 1914-1916.

Twilight Sleep (TS) describes the delivery, via an injection, of an amnestic drug cocktail to a parturient woman throughout labor. In order to understand the development of modern-day rhetoric surrounding childbirth methods and procedures, this article explores the debate over TS between the public and technical sphere in New York City between 1914 and 1916 and examines the ways in which this debate altered obstetric health care for middle- and upper-class White women. The public response to this campaign posed a direct challenge to male obstetricians in New York City, many of whom were ill-equipped, both literally and figuratively, to use this procedure. Using a feminist rhetorical criticism, we examined the pro-TS rhetoric of women writers in New York City, the methods they borrowed from the women's movement, and the ensuing dialogue between the public and technical spheres. For this study, we analyzed journal and newspaper articles, a pamphlet, a collection of pro-TS organizational documents, letters to the editor, and books published about TS and the history of birth. Lastly, we analyzed theoretical notions of childbirth in women's health and communication studies. After examining the TS debate, we found that birth practices for middle- and upper-class women in New York City shifted and the obstetric community gained ascendancy over female midwifery. We also found that in certain instances, the rhetoric of pro-TS activists was more technically accurate than the rhetoric of some physicians. Hence the TS debate emerged from an argument over the right to use technical language in the technical and/or the public sphere. Conclusions and implications offered by this historical, feminist analysis question our current understanding of women's health and birthing practices, doctor-patient communication, and patient empowerment and access to technical knowledge.

[The incredible story about the cesarean section from ancient times till nowadays].

During its evolution the cesarean section has meant different things to different people. The indications for it have changed throughout the course of history. From the initial purpose to retrieve an infant from a dead or dying mother in order to bury the child separately from his mother, to contemporary indications. This article strives to follow the roots of this common procedure--starting from the descriptions in the ancient Greek mythology, through the imperial Roman law, aspects of Judaism and the evolution of the procedure throughout modern history. Major improvements in the surgical techniques, the introduction of anesthesia and aseptic procedures contributed to the decline in mortality and morbidity rates. We will attempt to find the etymology for the expression "cesarean section" which has commonly been accounted to Julius Caesar's name, although history denies it. This review takes us on a historical journey, from ancient times to nowadays, in which we follow the course and nature of a procedure being performed daily in thousands of hospitals.

The development and historical context of the Datta short laryngoscope handle.

The hormonal, physiologic, and anatomic changes of pregnancy have a number of significant anesthetic implications, including the potential for difficulties and failures in tracheal intubation. The American Society of Anesthesiology closed claims database in the 1970s observed that maternal deaths were involved in 30% of all obstetrics claims, most stemming from difficulty with intubation or ventilation. In the late 1970s, Dr. Sanjay Datta, MBBS, an obstetric anesthesiologist at Brigham and Women's Hospital (Boston, MA), observed a number of differences in the practice of obstetric anesthesia in the United States when compared with his prior experiences in the United Kingdom and Canada. Dr. Datta perceived that parturients within North America had a higher body mass index. In addition, he observed an increased rate of cesarean delivery and general anesthesia use. These differences led him to evaluate ways in which the laryngoscope itself could be altered to improve the ease of intubation of parturients; this led to the development of the short laryngoscope handle. The genesis of the Datta short laryngoscope handle, and the accompanying historical context, will be explored.