Oxnard Delivers Rescue of Old Birthing Hospital

OXNARD —  Sugar beets gave birth to Oxnard, but the little farming burg was nourished on morphine and an amnesia-producing drug called scopolamine.

The town was laid out in 1897 around a refinery that squeezed sugar from beets, but it developed a reputation decades later as the California capital of “twilight sleep”--a revolutionary method of drug-assisted, painless childbirth.

Rancher Ray Swift remembers limousines gliding up to his father’s Lying-In Hospital and Sanatorium on 5th Street. Helped down by their chauffeurs, pregnant socialites from Los Angeles and beyond would tread across shaded courtyards to their rooms, where they awaited the injections that feminists of the day urged “for the betterment of womankind.”

Today, twilight sleep is an obstetric relic. No longer do women receive carefully timed injections of morphine to blunt the pain and scopolamine to blot out the experience. Medication is a more precise business, with the intent more to make women comfortable than comatose.

But the hospital where Dr. Floyd Swift delivered some 5,000 babies remains. As low-cost senior housing goes up on the site, the Oxnard City Council is to consider naming the vacant, Spanish Colonial Revival structure a city landmark. No date has been set, but city officials said the designation probably will happen sometime this fall.

“Dr. Swift was so well-known in the community and his facility was one of the few of its kind,” said Judy Triem, an architectural historian who was commissioned to study the site. “It was a unique situation.”

Banishing Agony

Swift was among a handful of practitioners who popularized twilight sleep in the United States after it was introduced from Germany in 1914. They drew a legion of expectant mothers to Oxnard for a plunge into the semiconscious state from which they would emerge without memory of agony, or ecstasy, or anything at all.

For decades before, the drugs of choice had been ether, chloroform, or a blend of both. But those potions deadened women’s muscular reactions so much that they could be used only late in labor. Pinpointing the proper dosage was tricky; while pain was reduced, the risk of hemorrhages and other potentially deadly side effects increased.

By contrast, twilight sleep erased pain but did not interfere with the natural process of contractions that pushes babies into the world. Because the scopolamine kept women from remembering the ordeal, they were more relaxed for their next childbirth.

“My mother-in-law felt it was the most wonderful thing ever invented,” said Elizabeth Blanchard, a Santa Paula woman who went through two childbirths with the aid of the anesthetic technique in the early 1940s. “She said she’d crawl from Santa Paula to Oxnard on her hands and knees to have twilight sleep.”

The technique even spawned its own lobbying group--the National Twilight Sleep Assn., which held rallies on street corners and in department stores to let women know about the dawning era of painless birth.

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Many doctors were resistant, but some took up the cause with zeal. One early promoter, Dr. Bertha van Hoosen, called it “the greatest boon the 20th century could give to women.” Another doctor favored it because it would prompt upper-class women to have more children, thereby creating “a better race for future generations.”

Floyd Swift was a recently minted osteopath from North Carolina when he set up shop in Oxnard in 1914. At St. John’s Hospital, he learned the fine points of twilight sleep from Dr. William R. Livingston, who had studied it at its birthplace in Germany.

In 1928, St. John’s ordered Swift out, following the American Medical Assn.’s recommendation that non-M.D.s be barred from hospital practice. That year, Swift hired a crew to haul his small office building several blocks to his home on 5th Street, where he broke ground on an attached 14-room hospital.

The Oxnard Daily Courier was effusive about his plans. The hospital would be equipped with “the finest equipment known to the medical profession,” the paper said. Fragrant gardens would bring recuperating mothers the benefits of cool, fresh air. Radio speakers in each room would “provide amusement for any patient in the building through one main receiving set.”

“Oxnard has long been known as the center of twilight sleep success in California, and as a result the name of St. John’s hospital is known to many,” the paper gushed. “With the addition of the Lying-In Hospital, which also will specialize in twilight sleep, the importance of Oxnard in this direction will become more pronounced.”

Shifting Attitudes

Swift traveled around the U.S., learning the latest in twilight-sleep techniques at the Mayo Clinic and elsewhere. He traded tips with his mentor Livingston and with Dr. H. F. Rey, another local practitioner who specialized in twilight sleep. At his hospital, he treated both rich and poor; charges for the delivery and a week’s stay ranged from $50 to $75.

Swift prospered. Even in the Depression, he could indulge his passion for cars and yachts. In 1930, he sailed his 56-foot yawl Mollilou to victory in the famed Transpac race from Los Angeles to Honolulu.

Swift took to the waves frequently, demonstrating his seamanship to his medical associates, and to his son Ray.

“When we’d go sailing, he’d sometimes talk about the hospital and twilight sleep with the other doctors,” recalled 67-year-old Ray Swift. “It was pretty touchy stuff. . . . They always had to be careful because the babies could turn blue [from oxygen deprivation]. The girls liked it, though.”

Over the years, twilight sleep had its ups and downs. On the one hand, it struck some as a little bizarre; under the drugs, women sometimes thrashed around so violently they had to be strapped down in crib-like beds. Still, it offered an alternative to the ether and chloroform that deadened them and could trigger terrible side effects.

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Even so, the technique garnered its share of criticism. Many doctors insisted the drugs were risky--a judgment bolstered by the death of a leading twilight-sleep advocate during childbirth. Some blamed it for mothers’ postpartum depression and babies’ breathing difficulties; others believed a woman’s place during delivery was in the all-too-real world of the birthing room, not off in a drug-induced dusk.

In 1927, novelist Edith Wharton wrote a scathing tale about Jazz Age matrons numbing themselves with drink, drugs and sex. She called it “Twilight Sleep.”

The technique finally faded a generation ago. Natural childbirth attracted many women, who preferred pain to utter oblivion.

“Twilight Sleep . . . effectively sealed a generation of women off from the experience of power and capability at birth,” wrote natural-childbirth advocates Penny Armstrong and Sheryl Feldman in a 1990 book on the subject. “It and all the other drugs that have been employed for the last century-and-a-half patterned our minds and made us think that half a birth is a whole birth and a whole birth is a twist of nature.”

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Today, greater pain control has come back into favor; about 25% of all women receive epidural anesthesia, which numbs pain but not consciousness. Other painkilling medications are also administered routinely.

After a long career, Swift retired in 1962; he died in 1980. The hospital compound started a long slide down. It was turned into an office for other osteopaths, then a drug rehabilitation center. In 1994, Mercy Charities Housing, a nonprofit group based in San Francisco, bought it so it could be razed for senior apartments. Vacant, it drew vandals and squatters.

However, preservationist Gary Blum, a member of the county’s Cultural Heritage Board, happened to live next door. He knew about the rare decorative tiles Swift had installed in the hospital’s stucco walls and he didn’t want to see part of Oxnard’s history come tumbling down.

He brought the case of the ailing hospital to the Ventura County Cultural Heritage Board, which also serves as Oxnard’s landmarks panel. (Because he owned neighboring property, he did not vote on matters related to the hospital, including the board’s eventual decision to recommend that the city give it landmark status.)

Preservation Pains

Blum, the owner of a century-old building at Oxnard’s Heritage Square, said the hospital’s appearance didn’t carry as much weight for the board as Swift’s place in a largely forgotten part of the city’s past.

“It wasn’t just the architectural style or the unique tiles,” Blum said. “It was really Swift and the breakthrough medical technology he was using.”

Revelations of the compound’s history prolonged the new owner’s labor pains. Mercy Charities Housing had planned to destroy the buildings, not renovate them. “When we first went to the city, quite a few community members came out and said this was a very important part of old Oxnard,” said project manager Dara Kovel. “Almost everyone we met said they were born either at St. John’s or the old Lying-In Hospital.”

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Three months of research and negotiation led to a redesigned project. Swift’s old residence would be turned into a home for the apartment buildings’ manager. The front half of the old hospital would be spared and turned into community rooms where residents can read, play cards and get together. The new buildings would be behind the compound, and go from two to three stories.

A plaque will go up on the site and a display in the lobby will commemorate Swift, whose Swift Memorial Health Care Foundation still gives local health-care providers grants of $150,000 each year.

Of course, all that came with a price. Kovel said the structures were so dilapidated that renovation costs will approach $500,000--a major chunk for a nonprofit group building housing for the poor.

Ultimately, it will be worth it, she said. A streetscape that has endured for 70 years won’t be changed and dozens of older people will be able to settle in a place tied to its past.

“It’s going to be a very special place,” she said. “The courtyards being preserved have a pleasant, peaceful sense about them. It will be a nice, comfortable place for seniors.”