Twilight Sleep and Sunrise Slumber: “Painless Childbirth” in Early Twentieth-Century America

This essay examines the emergence of obstetric anesthesia through two competing methods for "painless childbirth" in early twentieth-century America: Twilight Sleep and Sunrise Slumber. It explores the ways in which childbirth practices were established in America at the turn of the twentieth century and aims to reveal how contemporary American society accepted these two methods, what distinguished them from one another, and how medical knowledge and techniques competed for dominance. Sunrise Slumber, which involved the inhalation of nitrous oxide, was ultimately adopted in many regions, including Britain, Canada, and Australia. In the United States, however, it could not surpass Twilight Sleep, a method that rendered expectant mothers unconscious through the injection of morphine and scopolamine and had garnered strong support from American women. This essay demonstrates that the adoption of medical technology was shaped more by the political and social circumstances of the time than by its purported objective utility. Furthermore, it contributes to existing scholarship by tracing the history of various anesthetic methods developed to reduce or eliminate labor pain during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.