The Complete Call the Midwife Stories Jennifer Worth 4 Books Collection Collector's Gift-Edition (Shadows of the Workhouse, Farewell to the East End, Call the Midwife, Letters to the Midwife)

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The Complete Call the Midwife Stories Jennifer Worth 4 Books Collection Collector's Gift-Edition (Shadows of the Workhouse, Farewell to the East End, Call the Midwife, Letters to the Midwife)

The Complete Call the Midwife Stories Jennifer Worth 4 Books Collection Collector's Gift-Edition (Shadows of the Workhouse, Farewell to the East End, Call the Midwife, Letters to the Midwife)

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Should Doris have allowed Cyril to send away the baby she bore illegitimately? Did she have a choice? Edit: This is where I got angry. Really angry. In a passage describing how married women were "free" to cheat on their husbands because a pregnancy wouldn't be as difficult as for a single woman, Worth writes: However, it is also a glimpse of what the poor went through during that time frame. Mostly living in tenements or council housing, huge families lived in just a couple of rooms. Many of the women gave birth to more than TEN children—of course many didn't survive childhood, but it wasn't uncommon for women to have 13 or 14 births and ten kids to take care of. One woman in the book had the midwives out for her 24th birth!! This same woman, despite not speaking a word of English, instinctively hit on a modern treatment for premature babies, which was to “wear” the baby next to her skin in a sling. We now know that this helps the baby stay warm which means it uses fewer calories and needs less oxygen, but at the time, premature babies were generally whisked away and put in incubators with no cuddling or love. I liked the way the author gives a balanced presentation about workhouses - that the theory behind them was good, and that in some ways this system under good Masters did serve a social purpose, and I liked the ending of the book which recorded how one woman said the workhouse had been her life-line. Worth, Jennifer (2007). Eczema and Food Allergy: The Hidden Cause?: My Story. Merton Books. ISBN 978-1872560182.

Similarly, the varying roles of the nurses of Nonnatus House—including home visits for the elderly and infirm as well as prenatal care—would have been representative of the kind of work nurses during the time period would have done as part of the National Health Service or NHS. The NHS was instituted after the end of WWII as part of the UK's welfare state in an effort to ensure that all Britains had access to medical care. Worth asks, “What woman worthy of the name Mother would stand on a high moral platform about selling her body if her child were dying of hunger and exposure? Not I” (p. 162). Is it biology or psychology that drives women to extreme measures to protect their children while fathers often deny either paternity or their paternal responsibilities? As much as I believe her general representation of the era, I admit that her writing style here made me raise a cynical eyebrow far too often for me to rate the book higher. Why? Well, because there are too many occasions where she recounts actual conversations that we know she did not witness and it is highly improbable she would have ever heard about in such detail. This is particularly prevalent in section one where she quotes employees at the workhouses talking to one another. These are exchanges that even the people the conversations concerned weren't involved in. Of course memoirs are always going to be subjective, but it made me question the truthfulness of what I was reading- how much of it was truth and how much was her filling in the blanks with how she imagined it could have gone? She fares somewhat better in sections two and three where either she was involved (section two) or explains when the story was told to her (section three). A frank and unsentimental view of the conditions of the East End in 1950s London. Conditions were deplorable with overcrowding, poverty and large families with women producing more children each year. This was all before the Pill and other forms of contraception. Attitudes too were very closely aligned to gender and what was considered women’s work and what was men’s work. Rarely did those lines cross or even blur.There are also lively stories of Sister Monica Joan, who discovered the joys of taking a cab ride instead of the bus, and we learn about the woman who ran the local pub. The end of the book discusses how the neighborhood changed in the 1960s, and why the midwives and nuns eventually closed their practice. Worth retired from nursing in 1973 to pursue her musical interests. In 1974, she received a licentiate of the London College of Music, where she taught piano and singing. She obtained a fellowship in 1984. She performed as a soloist and with choirs throughout Britain and Europe.

Yes. And also because, aside from textbooks, there is no book in all American or European literature written by a midwife about midwifery. Given the enormity of the subject, that’s extraordinary! I watched the BBC series Call the Midwife before I read this, and knew I would not be able to be objective about it. I already knew all the beautiful people in the book before I started. I wouldn't know where to start if I were to enumerate all of them. Some are nuns, some are young midwives, some are courageous mothers doing their best in impossible situations, some amazing fathers providing and caring for their family in horrendous circumstances, and some piteous brave children surviving the unendurable. Always remember you are part of the most wonderful, the most important, and the most privileged calling in the world. Nursing and midwifery are a vocation, not just a job. Jennifer never allowed the challenges of life to defeat her. Some years ago, she suffered from a painful bout of eczema and asthma. She undertook a regime of swimming and bicycling, as well as home cures, and detailed some of her ideas in Eczema and Food Allergy: The Hidden Cause? (1997). Q. That sounds like a formidable list. What was the attrition rate among young midwives you have worked with?

Success!

The tuberculosis/pub/Julie's story was utterly depressing. I felt so sorry for Julie, she lost all her siblings, wasn't really loved by her parents, and then lost her own beloved child. She didn't deserve all that loss and suffering, at least she still had her pub at the end, which was probably some comfort to her. I preferred the format of this one compared to the second book, there was a lot more focus on Jenny's experiences, her patients, and midwifery in general. The midwives that Jennifer trained and worked with were mostly nuns. Some were peaceful, some were fierce. One nun, Sister Monica Joan, was very elderly and becoming senile, retired in Nonnatus House, where the nuns lived and operated. There were several funny anecdotes about her—at least they are funny now as they are read, I'm sure they were incredibly frustrating at the time! How many Americans today are experiencing similar economic pain due to our housing crash and recession? Our middle class is deteriorating as Americans experience downward mobility. Many are being forced from their homes and losing communities they love to financial bureaucratic maneuvering, unable to find work, becoming impoverished and worse, physically disabled, as they grow older. Thousands in our cities cannot find adequate housing. (For example: there are 25,000 names on San Francisco's waiting list for public housing.) The numbers are legion as our society increasingly becomes fractured and stratified. Are we becoming a country of wealthy elite special interests and ignorant disenfranchised poor like those our ancestors left behind?



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