DrJWW ~ TwiSleep invented vocabulary of shock & suffering

copied from 13″ MacAir

DrJWW_Twilite-sleep-bk_Vocabulary-sufferng-CB_2010

Quotes characterizing the tone and
unique perspective on gender and childbirth
as described by the author and Dr.J. Whitridge Williams.

Basic vocabulary for describing normal childbirth:

Terror, Ordeal, Acute suffering, Useless suffering, Agonies of childbirth, Agonies of tortured humanity, Traditional terrors of childbirth, Millions of her suffering sisters, Shock that ordinarily attends the ordeal of childbirth, the most intense to which a human be can be subjected, civilized women of the most highly developed nervous or intellectual type who suffer most, pain needlessly suffered by the mothers of the race in carrying out their essential function of motherhood. . . .

“Even in this second decade of the 20^th century, the generality of women bring forth their children in sorrow, quite after the ancient fashion, unsolaced by even single whiff of the beneficent anesthetic vapors through the use of which, in the poetic phrasing of Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the agonies of tortured humanity may be stepped in the waters of forgetfulness. Page 10 …

…how has it come about that this most natural and essential function should have come to be associated with so much seemingly useless suffering. p.12

…something has been told of the wonderful effort that has been make by a band of wise physicians in Germany to give solace to the expectant mother, and to relieve the culminating hours of childbirth of their traditional terrors.

The wise physicians in question are associated with the University and Hospital of Freiburg. For years they have labored to perfect a method that shall make childbirth painless.

“Nature provides that when a woman bears a child she shall suffer the most intense pain that can be devised!  The pain of childbirth is the most intense, perhaps to which a human be can be subjected.” Ch. 4:

….if we look deeply enough, that the suffering of women in childbirth serves a beneficent, even though occult purpose in the scheme of human evolution? p. 38

…. an inkling of the answer is found when we learn that women of primitive and barbaric tribes appear to suffer comparatively little in labor, coupled with the fact that it is civilized women of the most highly developed nervous or intellectual type who suffer most. p. 39

This seems to suggest that the excessive pains of childbirth are not a strictly ‘natural’ concomitant of motherhood, but rather that they are an extraneous and in a sense an abnormal product of civilization.

Every one knows that the law of natural selection through survival of the fittest, which as Darwin taught us, determined the development of all races in a state of nature, does not fully apply to human beings living under the artificial conditions of civilization. These artificial conditions often determine that the less fit, rather then the most fit, individuals shall have progeny and that undesirable than the desirable qualities shall be perpetuated.

…… any trait or habit may be directly detrimental to the individual and to the race and they may be preserved, generation after generation, through the fostering influence of the hot-house conditions of civilized existence. p. 40

Is there not fair warrant for the assumption that the pains which civilized women—and in particular the most delicately organized women –suffer in childbirth may be classed in this category?

I believer the answer must be an unqualified affirmative. Consider from an evolutionary standpoint, the pains of labor appear not only uncalled for, but positively menacing to the race.

 “In Johns Hopkins Hospital,” said Dr Williams, “no patient is conscious when she is delivered of a child. She is oblivious, under the influence of chloroform or ether. I could not see wherein the patients at Freiburg have a great advantage over those under chloroform narcosis; I certainly think the condition of the latter is a more pleasant one for the attendants and surrounding patients. But the obstetricians of Europe do not use chloroform and ether to assuage the pains of labor as we do here in American and this perhaps accounts in part for the interest that has been shown in the morphine-scopolamin[e] method.” p. 67