Twilight Sleep and Sunrise Slumber: “Painless Childbirth” in Early Twentieth-Century America
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".