After from five to twenty minutes the womb begins to contract again, but the pains (_dolores ad secundum partum_) are not nearly so intense as they were during labor. Then in from fifteen minutes to about three hours the placenta is expelled. The pains of labor are so evident that the expulsive contractions of the uterus, of which the pains are symptoms, are themselves called "the pains." These pains in all scientific exactness of statement are, as has been said, agonizing. "In dolore paries filios" is a very literal text. The scopolamine-morphine method was devised with the intention of mitigating them, or mercifully rendering the woman unconscious of them during at least a part of the labor. If she is unconscious of pain she is thus saved also from shock and depression, which render her susceptible to infection. Such results certainly are immeasurably valuable if attainable without taint of moral evil, but as the method stands just now, they are not free from that taint. Scopolamine hydrobromide, one of the drugs used in this method, is an alkaloid obtained from the roots of _Scopolia_ (or _Scopola_) _carniolica_, and it cannot be differentiated chemically from hyoscine hydrobromide, which is made from henbane and other plants of the _Solanaceae_ group. Rusby was of the opinion that scopolamine is really a mixture of hyoscine, hyoscyamine, and atropine: one-tenth hyoscine and nine-tenths hyoscyamine and atropine. Cushny and others find different proportions of these alkaloids. As the leaves of _Scopolia_ are used to adulterate the belladonna leaves from which atropine is derived, hyoscine and scopolamine are substituted for each other--if, indeed, there is an any real difference between them. Some of the largest drug-houses in Germany before the war supplied hyoscine and scopolamine from the same stock bottle--the name depended on the asker. Even in a pure state hyoscine and scopolamine have the same chemical formula (C{17}H{21}NO{4}), and their physiological action is the same. Each can exist in three isomeric forms, and in one of these forms they turn polarized light to the left, in another to the right, while in a third form they do not affect the light at all. The higher the rotatory power of the drugs, the more active they are physiologically. The levorotatory scopolamine has, according to Cushny, Peebles, and Hug, double the action of the inactive scopolamine on the cardiac inhibitory fibres of the vagus, but the levoactive and the inactive scopolamine produce the same effect on the central nervous system. The drug on the market is usually composed of a mixture of the levoactive and the inactive forms, and as one or the other predominates the results differ: the rotatory power of a given specimen should be known. Old solutions of scopolamine decompose and give rise to toxic substances. Gauss attributed post-partum hemorrhages in the women and asphyxia in infants to these decomposition products, but he avoided these