Dear Wendy,
Started reading your book and got so excited that I had to stop and send you the following collection of quotes on the unique form of eugenics espoused in “TWILIGHT SLEEP – Simple Discoveries in Painless Childbirth” published in 1914.
My original problem with this extraordinary historical material was getting emotionally hijacked by the misogyny and the racially-based eugenics and the motives behind them. The author was using of the prejudice associated with ‘racial’ superiority and ethnic purity to extract large amounts of money from the philanthropists of his day, and if that planned worked, to line up an endless revenue stream from middle and upper class women who as healthy maternity and paying customers, would have been convinced to be electively hospitalized to the tune of nearly 2 million a year.
This book on “”Painless Childbirth” was written by Dr. Henry Smith Williams, an MD, attorney and science writer, at the request of Dr. J. Whitridge Williams. Dr JWW was associate professor of gynecology in at Johns Hopkins University Hospital beginning in 1894, vice-president of the American Gynecological Society in 1903-04, Chief of Obstetrics at Johns Hopkins University Hospital until 1910 and dean of the Johns Hopkins Medical School from 1911 to 1923. The targeted audience were the philanthropists of the day (Carnegie and Rockefellers Foundations).
Dr. J. Whitridge Williams’ grand vision – alternately referred to as his project or his scheme — was a national system of community hospitals “as ubiquitous if not quite as numerous as schools and libraries”. A core goal of Dr. J. W. Williams as an influential spokesman for organized medicine was to avoid any form of government funding (i.e. ‘socialized’ medicine) by devising a stable business model for this national network of privately-owned hospitals.
Dr. Williams believed the secret to success was expanding the market for hospital care to include a new category of patient – healthy childbearing women. He then planned on using the revenue stream generated by these ‘lying-in’ wards of healthy maternity patients to underwrite laboratory, x-ray and other services necessary to provide for a well-equipped surgery department. Unlike seasonal illness and the random nature of heart disease and accident victims, hospitalizing women for normal childbirth was a dependable category of paying customers taken from a steady stream of two million potential maternity patients a year.
What follows is just a collection of quotes on this particular topic – a perverse form of eugenics and Darwinian evolution used to build the case that the pain of labor in educated and upper class white childbearing women had become pathological due to the corrupting influence of civilization, while the working poor and ethnic minorities continued to multiply like rabbits and enjoy easy natural births, thus risking the over-populating the US with black and brown and Catholic Irish immigrants. Or to quote Dr. JWW himself:
“… 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.”
According to Dr. JWW, the way to seduce the more “delicate” or desirable European population to have more babies was to offer hospitalization for the purpose of “blissful unconsciousness”. That said, I think this was disingenuous argument advanced by Dr. Williams his own political purposes – he want pregnant women in his hospital beds and any ‘scheme’ to achieve that goal would do.
So here is just a string of excerpts – reading them in context is much better:
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… 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.
“…. the cultured woman of to-day has a nervous system that makes her far more susceptible to pain and to resultant shock than was her more lethargical ancestor of remote generations.
…. taking up on a comprehensive scale the vitality important project of lessening the sum total of human suffering by systematically and habitually assuaging the pain needlessly suffered by the mothers of the race in carrying out their essential function of motherhood.
…… 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.
Such a woman not unnaturally shrinks from the dangers and pains incident to child-bearing; yet such cultured women are precisely the individuals who should propagate the species and thus promote the interests of the race.
Everyone knows that the law of natural selection through survival of the fittest, which as Darwin taught us … does not fully apply to human beings living under the artificial conditions of civilization which “often determine that the less fit, rather than the most fit, individuals shall have progeny and that undesirable rather than the desirable qualities shall be perpetuated.”
Nature provides that when a woman bears a child she shall suffer the most intense pain that can be devised!
The problem of making child-bearing a less hazardous ordeal and a far less painful one for these nervous and sensitive women is a problem that concerns not merely the women themselves, but the coming generations.
…. 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.
That “…the sacred function of maternity … causes her months of illness and hours of agony;
Let the robust, phlegmatic, nerveless woman continue to have her children without seeking the solace of narcotics or the special attendance of expert obstetricians, if she prefers. But let her not stand in the way of securing such solace and safety for her more sensitive sisters.… every patient who goes to the hospital may have full assurance that she will pass through what would otherwise be a dreaded ordeal in a state of blissful unconsciousness.
“Considered from an evolutionary standpoint, the pains of labor appear not only uncalled for, but positively menacing to the race.”
…. the pains which civilized women—and in particular the most delicately organized women –suffer in childbirth may be classed in this category?
“Acute pain at birth cannot, in the case of sensitive women, be termed physiological, for it frequently occasions a condition of severe exhaustion even after birth.
…by way of summary as to the abnormalities … and the needlessness and harmfulness of painful labor, I cannot do better … than quote Dr. Kronig himself. ….the Freiburg specialis (German MD who invented the ‘Twilight Sleep drug regeme). In addition to pointing out the exhausting and harmful effects of painful labor on the women of sensitive organization, has something to say also about an aspect of the matter to which I have hitherto referred but very briefly–… namely that when women are given respite from the pains of labor, there is much less liability of the use of forceps.
“Of late,” he says, “the demand made of us obstetricians to diminish or abolish suffering during delivery has become more and more emphatic. The modern women, on whose nervous system nowadays quite other demands are made than was formally the case, responds to the stimulus of severe pain more rapidly with nervous exhaustion and paralysis of the will to carry the labor to a conclusion. The sensitiveness of those who carry on the hard mental work is much greater than that of those who earn their living by manual labor.
“As a consequence of this nervous exhaustion we see that precisely in the care of mothers of the better class the use of forceps has increased to an alarming extent, and this where there is no structural need of forceps. The forceps had been used simply and solely to shorten the pains of labor.
One is only astonished that the long-continued exhaustion does not occur more frequently, when we realize what a sensitive women has to endure during her confinement, even taking into consideration the mental impressions alone.
“The preliminary pains are probably stood well. But with their increasing frequency and violence the moral resistance breaks down. She feels her strength giving way, and does nothing but beg the doctor to use forceps and put an end to her agony, and longs only for the moment when she will be released from pain by the chloroform or ether.
“It is true that robust women can stand all this without consequent injury to their nervous system; but is equally undeniable that, if there is the slightest inclination to a neuropathic condition, such severe bodily and psychical injury is the cause of a long period of exhaustion.”
More general comments:
That word “physiological” has all along stood as a barrier in the way of progress.
- 67 “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.
Letting Dr JWW get the last words:
- 69
“The peculiar ills to which women are subject by virtue of their sex are so familiar that we are apt to overlook their number and importance. Dr. Williams called attention to them in a recent address before the American Association for the Study and Prevention of Infant Mortality and he emphasized others in a private conversation.
Have you ever considered,” he said, “the economical significance of the fact that three out of every five women are more or less incapacitated for several days each month, and that one of them is quite unable to attend to her duties.
Granting that the two sexes are possessed of equal intelligence, it means that women cannot expect to compete successfully with men. For until they are able to work under pressure for 30 days each month, they cannot expect the same compensation as the men who do so.”