January 2013 - Call the Midwife

Our group met on the last day of January at the home of Marcia Rost to discuss Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy and Hard Times by Jennifer Worth.  Ratings from the book were high, with several giving it a 9 and a few in the 5-6 range.  The club members and Glenn had some good conversation about the book, covering such questions as how many children in a family is 'ideal', modern medicine vs. natural childbirth and the ethical implications of taking away children from mothers deemed as 'unfit'.

Call the Midwife is described by Publisher's Weekly:

From Publishers Weekly

Worth gained her midwife training in the 1950s among an Anglican order of nuns dedicated to ensuring safer childbirth for the poor living amid the Docklands slums on the East End of London. Her engaging memoir retraces those early years caring for the indigent and unfortunate during the pinched postwar era in London, when health care was nearly nonexistent, antibiotics brand-new, sanitary facilities rare, contraception unreliable and families with 13 or more children the norm. Working alongside the trained nurses and midwives of St. Raymund Nonnatus (a pseudonym she's given the place), Worth made frequent visits to the tenements that housed the dock workers and their families, often in the dead of night on her bicycle. Her well-polished anecdotes are teeming with character detail of some of the more memorable nurses she worked with, such as the six-foot-two Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne, called Chummy, who renounced her genteel upbringing to become a nurse, or the dotty old Sister Monica Joan, who fancied cakes immoderately. Patients included Molly, only 19 and already trapped in poverty and degradation with several children and an abusive husband; Mrs. Conchita Warren, who was delivering her 24th baby; or the birdlike vagrant, Mrs. Jenkins, whose children were taken away from her when she entered the workhouse. (Apr.)
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