Bertha Van Hoosen; Elizabeth Ross Shaw
Chicago: The House of Manz, 1915.

Van Hoosen (1863-1952), pioneering American surgeon, was the first woman to head a surgical department at a coeducational university and a co-founder of the American Medical Women’s Association in 1915. She was a leading American advocate of scopolamine-morphine anaesthesia in obstetrics, the so-called Twilight Sleep method developed at the University of Freiburg. The technique, which rendered patients semiconscious and eliminated memory of labour pain, became the subject of a national campaign intersecting with first-wave feminist and suffrage-era activism following a widely-read 1914 McClure’s Magazine expose. Van Hoosen’s text, drawing on extensive clinical experience, covers the method’s application in both general surgery and obstetrics, with Shaw contributing a psychological study of patients under the Giessen protocol. Illustrated with a mounted photographic frontispiece and fifteen plates. This copy with a presentation inscription by the author.