In the past two weeks, I have seen several postings in various forums, blogs, and on birth related news sites about the show Mad Men which depicted the shows character Betty Draper giving birth to her third child with something called “twilight sleep” which unfortunately was very common during this period of time. A great description of the episode itself was from Science and Sensibility writer, Amy Romano :
Last week, the main character’s wife, Betty Draper, gave birth to her third child. While her husband, Don, sits in the waiting room drinking scotch with another nervous expectant dad, Betty is subjected to 1960’s “standard of care” obstetrics. Left alone in a labor room, she is shaved, given an enema, and then receives the crown jewel of her modern childbirth experience: medications to induce twilight sleep, which also induce a mad stupor and land Betty in restraints because of her erratic, combative behavior. As a midwife and a mother, the most difficult part for me to watch was when Betty awoke from her stupor, swaddled baby in arms, with no memory of the experience. You can watch all of the birth-related clips from the show at Jezebel.
http://blog.ctnews.com/elwood/2009/09/29/going-back-in-time-twilight-sleep/#comment-52
http://www.unnecesarean.com/blog/2009/6/12/your-friendly-1936-neighborhood-ob-says-dont-kiss-your-baby.html
Sometimes it feels like previous generations have no idea what the women of childbearing age are doing with all of this crazy baby-holding and baby-walking-around-with and cuddling that seems like coddling. Surely the child just screamed in the store because he his spoiled from all of this attention! The young women with their conscious births and “bonding” and wearing of the babies— they’re mad!
Today would be as good a day as any to let their criticism and fears about parenting, out-of-hospital birth and breastfeeding roll right off like water off a duck’s back. This guy might have been their obstetrician, and they might have placed great weight on his advice. He was a doctor, after all.
The fourteenth century surgeon Guy de Chauliac acknowledged the debt he owed to his predecessors saying that “We are like children standing on the shoulders of a giant, for we can see all that the giant can see, and a little more”. No branch in medicine can claim a longer history than the art of midwifery.
However, true advancement in this specialty occurred during the eighteenth century which saw the introduction of the formal teaching of midwifery both to female midwives and to male practitioners.
http://www.insiteronline.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=560&Itemid=1
Stanislawa was arrested in Lodz on February 18, 1943, with her daughter and two sons. The sons were sent to the labor camp at Mathausen and Gusen to work in the stone quarries. She and her daughter, Sylvia, were sent to Auschwitz where they arrived on April 17, 1943. They were given the numbers 41335 and 41336, tattooed on their forearms. They would remain as mementos of the camp.
They were deprived of all possessions, stripped, shaven, and given camp clothing – striped overalls and some underwear. Sylvia recalls that she received two left-foot slip. All of the clothing was infested with lice. Stanislawa spent two years in the women’s facility at Auschwitz, working as a midwife in three different blocks. The “sick-ward” in all of these was the same: 40-meter long bare wooden barracks heated by single brick stove.
http://www.4marks.com/articles/details.html?article_id=2593
Commentator Kristal Brent Zook says there are a lot of lessons medical practitioners could learn from African-American midwife traditions. Zook is a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and a contributing writer for Essence magazine.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5061075
Audio: http://www.npr.org/templates/player/mediaPlayer.html?action=1&t=1&islist=false&id=5061075&m=5061076