Recommended Summer Reading

The Midwife, by Jennifer Worth

I just finished this book last week and loved every page of it. Jennifer Worth started as a young midwife in the early 1950s in the very poor, impoverished streets and hovels of East End London. These are the hard years following WWII. Folks are living with huge families in squalid two room flats. The government had billed most of the buildings as condemned, yet it was another 15-20 years before folks were actually evacuated and the buildings knocked down. Midwives and nurses were much respected during the time. Because most women were still having home births at the time and hospital birth generally had less favorable outcomes than home births, midwives were seen as life savers. And indeed they were. What I liked best about the book is how she describes how to sit on your hands and wait as a birth attendant. Over management can lead to disastrous results, so she practiced the way that out-of-hospital midwives are still taught today. Essentially, watch and wait and trust. Our bodies are wise.