Take Two Crackers and Call Me in the Morning!

Once considered a psychological “woman’s” problem, severe morning sickness can rapidly progress to a life-threatening condition, missed too often by the un-informed and has claimed more than one life.  Historical treatments dispensed included the bizarre as well as the dangerous from use of leeches, injections of husbands’ blood, electro-shock treatments and removal of the vomit bucket to name but a handful of desperate measures concocted by frustrated physicians.   The list of unsuccessful remedies was so extensive it lead to a statement by S. Rosen in 1955, addressing the Upstate Inter Hospital Conference of New York’s Department of Mental Hygiene that the “number of successful treatments are even more numerous that those for warts”.

Severe morning sickness is serious stuff.  Dehydration, starvation/malnutrition, birth defects and fetal death/miscarriage are consequences  all seen by the author during her long tenure on the high-risk obstetrical unit at Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which at one point in time, delivered over 10,000 babies a year.