The Midwives Book


Book Description

This work supplied English midwives and English women with a compendium of information for the Continent and from the author's own thirty years of experience.




Arms Wide Open


Book Description

The author of The Blue Cotton Gown recounts living free and naturally against all odds—and discovering her true calling as a midwife—in this deeply moving memoir In her first, highly praised memoir, Patricia Harman told us the stories patients brought into her exam room, and her own story of struggling to help women as a nurse-midwife in medical practice with her husband—an OB/GYN—in Appalachia. Now, Patsy reaches back to the 1960s and 1970s, recounting how she learned to deliver babies and her youthful experiments with living a fully sustainable, natural life. Drawing heavily on her journals, Arms Wide Open goes back to a time of counter-culture idealism that the boomer generation remembers well. Patsy opens with stories of living in the wilds of Minnesota in a log cabin she and her lover build with their own hands, the only running water being the nearby streams. They set up beehives and give chase to a bear competing for the honey. Patsy gives birth and learns to help her friends deliver as naturally as possible. Weary of the cold and isolation, Patsy moves to a commune in West Virginia, where she becomes a self-taught midwife delivering babies in cabins and homes. Her stories sparkle with drama and intensity, but she wants to help more women than healthy hippie homesteaders. After a ten-year sojourn for professional training, Patsy and her husband return to Appalachia, where they set up a women's health practice. They deliver babies together—this time in hospitals—and care for a wide variety of gyn patients. They live in a lakeside contemporary home, though their hearts are still firmly implanted in nature. The obstetrical climate is changing. The Harmans' family is changing. The earth is changing—but Patsy's arms remain wide open to life and all it offers. Her memoir of living free and sustainably against all odds will be especially embraced by anyone who lived through the Vietnam War and commune era, and all those involved in the back-to-nature and natural-childbirth movements.




Baby Catcher


Book Description

In this engaging account of her career as a midwife, Vincent describes the hilarious, sometimes frightening, events surrounding the appearance of a new human being. More than a collection of unforgettable stories, "Baby Catcher" is a clarion call for a less technological, more personalized approach to childbirth in this country.




Call The Midwife


Book Description

A fascinating slice of social history - Jennifer Worth's tales of being a midwife in 1950s London, now a major BBC TV series. Jennifer Worth came from a sheltered background when she became a midwife in the Docklands in the 1950s. The conditions in which many women gave birth just half a century ago were horrifying, not only because of their grimly impoverished surroundings, but also because of what they were expected to endure. But while Jennifer witnessed brutality and tragedy, she also met with amazing kindness and understanding, tempered by a great deal of Cockney humour. She also earned the confidences of some whose lives were truly stranger, more poignant and more terrifying than could ever be recounted in fiction. Attached to an order of nuns who had been working in the slums since the 1870s, Jennifer tells the story not only of the women she treated, but also of the community of nuns (including one who was accused of stealing jewels from Hatton Garden) and the camaraderie of the midwives with whom she trained. Funny, disturbing and incredibly moving, Jennifer's stories bring to life the colourful world of the East End in the 1950s.




The Midwife's Apprentice


Book Description

In a small village in medieval England, a young homeless girl acquires a home and a new career when she becomes the apprentice to a sharp-tempered midwife.




Developing Destinies


Book Description

Destiny and Development is an engaging narrative of one remarkable person's life and the life of her community that blends psychology, anthropology, and history to reveal the integral role that culture plays in human development.




Shadows of the Workhouse


Book Description

In the 1950s Jennifer Worth was a district midwife in the Docklands of East London where the aftermath of the war meant many lived in shocking conditions. She worked with the Nursing Sisters of St John the Divine, nurses and midwives whose vocation was to work amongst the poorest of the poor. Despite the official closure of the workhouses in 1930, there was nowhere else for many inmates to go so they changed their names and carried on much as before. In 'Shadows of the Workhouse', Jennifer tells the stories of the men and women she met who began their lives in the workhouse.




Mother and Child Were Saved


Book Description

A very short book, "Mother and Child were Saved" features a translation of the memoirs that Frisian midwife, Catharina Schrader had written in the late 17th and the early 18th centuries. These were extracted from her notes that documented almost 3000 deliveries over the course of Schrader's career as a midwife. The memoir, exhibited around 100 of the most complicated that Schrader had helped with. These included both mother and child who had died, some where only the child died, some where one of a set of multiples lived, some where both lived happily. Though the essays and the introduction focus on the medical aspects of Schrader's career. The social aspect as a female midwife in a period of medicalized transition cannot be overlooked. One can see the burgeoning reticence emanate even from Schrader herself towards midwives who were incompetent and merely "tortured" their patients. However, this Memoir is integral for any study of midwifery in Europe during the early modern period. While the introductory essays could have been expanded to consider the social consequences of gender and midwifery, the fact that the Memoirs have been translated from their mix of three languages (Dutch, German and Frisian) into one ubiquitous language: English, gives the modern historian greater access to a primary source that details the travails and tribulations that women faced during this period that did not have the same kind of prenatal care that women see today. Ultimately, women faced with every birth, the possibility that they could die, and this memoir shows that there was a marked response to do anything they could to prevent that on the part of midwives and other obstetrical practitioners during this period. Regardless with the lack of exploration into the issues surrounding gender or the views of conception or any other number of paths that the essayists at the beginning could have explored, this work should be read by any historian that is considering gender in the early modern period.




The Birth House


Book Description

In this breathtaking debut novel, Ami McKay has created an unforgettable portrait of the struggles that women have faced to control their own bodies and to keep the best parts of tradition alive in the world of modern medicine. The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare—the first daughter in five generations of Rares. As apprentice to the outspoken Acadian midwife Miss Babineau, Dora learns to assist the women of an isolated Nova Scotian village through infertility, difficult labors, breech births, unwanted pregnancies, and even unfulfilling sex lives. During the turbulent World War I era, uncertainty and upheaval accompany the arrival of a brash new medical doctor and his promises of progress and fast, painless childbirth. Dora soon finds herself fighting to protect the rights of women as well as the wisdom that has been put into her care. A tale of tradition and science, matriarchy and paternalism, past and future, The Birth House is "a dazzling first novel." (Library Journal), and a story more timely than ever.




The Child


Book Description