Definitions
from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.
- noun An amnesic condition characterized by insensibility to pain without loss of consciousness, induced by an injection of morphine and scopolamine, especially to relieve the pain of childbirth.
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.
- noun An
amnesic condition characterized byinsensibility topain without loss ofconsciousness , induced by aninjection ofmorphine andscopolamine , especially to relieve the pain ofchildbirth .
from WordNet 3.0 Copyright 2006 by Princeton University. All rights reserved.
- noun a state of general anesthesia in which the person retains a slight degree of consciousness; can be induced by injection of scopolamine or morphine
Etymologies
from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License
Calque of German Dämmerschlaf.
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Examples
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chained_bear commented on the word twilight sleep
"Twilight Sleep was also called scopolamine (the same stuff used for motion sickness) and made you feel in a fog and powerless while you still had pain. Believe me, I had it and it was a Twilight Nightmare."
—"anonygrandmom"
"The early-twentieth-century labor pain relief known as Twilight Sleep is often used as an example of the subjugation of laboring women to the oppressive male medical regime. But it was actually championed by suffragettes as emancipating! The return-to-nature childbirth movement was largely a reaction to various practices of drugging women and then bringing them their babies at some later point. These days we have much, much safer and more humane methods of medical pain relief, and many people think that turning down these options is just plain masochistic."
—Rebecca Odes and Ceridwen Morris, From the Hips, 144
April 18, 2009