Sometimes the optimism of the past is unbearable. From the Boston American, October 1915:
Twilight sleep was, when it was devised, heralded by prominent women as a genuine miracle of medicine. The “Freiburg miracle,” however, required the careful individual attention of a doctor throughout a woman’s labor, which is to say that it required a woman with a lot of money to travel to a specialist’s clinic. Efforts to produce twilight sleep on a mass scale in American hospitals led to hallucinatory, painful, brutal experiences. One of its proponents, Mrs. Francis Carmody, actually died under it. But here in 1915, twilight sleep was still believed to be a gift to women.
Although twilight sleep could depress the breathing of infants, potentially endangering them, the two babies named in the article must have recovered from any troubles they had. Both of them led long lives. Trumbull Blake died in Florida in 1986. Edmund Dana Garfield, Jr., died in 2003, and was fondly remembered as an aviator and a loyal Texan.
L.T. Patridge 