Embryo Project Encyclopedia Articles

Twilight Sleep (Dammerschlaf) was a form
of childbirth first used in the early twentieth century in Germany in
which drugs caused women in labor to enter a state of sleep prior to
giving birth and awake from childbirth with no recollection of the
procedure. Prior to the early twentieth century, childbirth was
performed at home and women did not have anesthetics to alleviate the
pain of childbirth. In 1906, obstetricians Bernhardt Kronig and Karl
Gauss developed the twilight sleep method in 1906 to relieve the pain of
childbirth using a combination of the drugs scopolamine and morphine.
Twilight sleep contributed to changing childbirth from an at home
process to a hospital procedure and increased the use of anesthetics in
obstetrics.