Painless Child-Birth

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 60, 4 December 1937, Page 4 (Supplement)

Painless Child-Birth

New Apparatus Used With Success ‘'Dominion” Special Service.—Dy Air Mail. London, October 29. .AN inexpensive apparatus no bigger than a suitcase is being shown at. the London Medical Exhibition which, it is claimed, will banish almost all the pain from child-birth. It has been approved by the Central Midwives’ Board, and is a way of administering nitrous oxide or “laughing gas” to a patient in suHicient quantities to banish the sense of pain without loss of consciousness. It is already being used most successfully at the biggest maternity hospital in London, and it is claimed that no special skill is required to administer it. The loss of his first wife in childbirth was mentioned by Sir John Simon in a speech at a dinner of the British College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists in London this week. After praising the work of the members of the college in helping to reduce maternal mortality. Sir John said: “Is there any single part of this art of healing, with its many divisions and compartments, which touches the sympathy and emotion of the ordinary man like the thought that they may help at. the time of the birth of a now infant into the world?

./‘That moment in so many homes is prepared for anxiously, expected so long. Intended to be. designed to be, believed to be a moment of groat domestic happiness. * “But some of us have known—and T am one of thorn —how at that moment hope may he destroyed, a black cloud may be burst upon the home, and it may be left shattered, motherless and in despair.” Sir John's first wife died in 1902, after tbo birth of her third child.