IT HAS been a common observation that babies born of mothers given heavy sedation with barbiturate drugs and other preparations may themselves show oversedation, even to the point of severe respiratory depression. The relation of oversedation of mothers to the neonatal death rate has been commented on by numerous investigators. The stress has been placed on severe oversedation, and little has been said of that large group of infants who are born with milder degrees of drowsiness.
It is the purpose of this paper to present electroencephalographic observations on a group of newborn infants whose mothers were given varying doses of "seconal sodium" (sodium 5-allyl-5-[1-methyl-butyl] barbiturate) during labor. The technic used for obtaining electroencephalograms on neonates was described in another communication.1 All the data presented were obtained on full term, normal infants born of women whose labors and deliveries were uneventful.
The chief observation in this investigation was a