Deliver me from pain; anesthesia and birth in America.

9780801891106

Deliver me from pain; anesthesia and birth in America.

Wolf, Jacqueline H.

Johns Hopkins U. Press

2009

277 pages

$50.00

Hardcover

RG732

Wolf (history of medicine, Ohio U.) traces the long and bitter debate over the use of anesthesia during childbirth in the US from the first use of ether and chloroform during the 1840s to the natural childbirth movement of the 1970s and its demise a generation later. Among the intermediate stages are twilight sleep and the question of professional respect from the 1890s through the 1930s, developing the obstetric anesthesia arsenal from 1900 through the 1960s, and giving birth to the baby boomers as a question of convenience from the 1940s to the 1960s.

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