Hanna Rion andThe Weekly Dispatch’s twilight sleep crusade

Abstract

The story of twilight sleep is an important, yet neglected, episode in the history of obstetric pain relief in Britain. One reason for its neglect in historical writing is that most of the discussion of the therapy took place in newspapers, particularly theWeekly Dispatch. Using digitised newspapers, as well as medical journals, this article reconstructs the largely overlooked story of twilight sleep in Britain. Twilight sleep was comprised of two drugs, scopolamine and morphine, which acted together to remove the pain of labour, as well as memory of it. Twilight sleep gained popularity in 1915 in Britain, a year after it became popular in America, on which most scholarship has focused. One of the main advocates for the use of twilight sleep in Britain was Hanna Rion, who wrote a series of weekly articles in 1916 campaigning for its use. Rion’s articles, and the response to them, show how the rise in popularity of twilight sleep reflected concerns about a declining birth rate amidst the backdrop of World War I. Through studying twilight sleep we see how women began to see themselves as consumers and shape medical practice, before the natural childbirth movement, which it has traditionally been attributed to. Therefore, twilight sleep provides us with the missing link in the story of obstetric anaesthetics, between the discovery of chloroform in 1847 and the natural childbirth movement in the 1930s.