Book #11: Call the Midwife by Jennifer Worth

Maybe a year ago in North Carolina, a friend in our ward invited a lot of people over to watch the season premiere (or maybe finale?) of Call the Midwife on PBS. I'd heard of it before but never seen it, and wanted to go just for the girls' night out fun. I really enjoyed the episode we watched, but oh, I hate, hate, hate watching births. I am always so terrified that there's going to be a "twist" and the mom is going to get eclampsia (a la Downton) or the baby's going to die--and I hate imagining those possibilities when I'm in this childbearing phase of my life and going through pregnancies and births myself. So although I think I would like the show in general, I can't make myself watch any more of it because of the fear that it will be too realistic. But I have heard good reviews of the book and decided to check it out--because reading about births is so different than seeing them, and also because the historical setting makes it really fascinating to learn about this time and era that I've never thought much about (midwifery in 1950s East End London). I always love discovering these pockets of history that aren't part of the usual History-with-a-capital-H narrative--and of course, there are too many of those to count.

I really enjoyed reading Call the Midwife. Although there is a PBS series based on it, which makes you think it's fictional (and I'm sure the PBS series isn't all factual), the book is actually a memoir based on Jennifer Worth's true experiences as a midwife in London in the 1950s. The fact that it's all real and it truly happened, and that things really were that way at that time makes the book all the more fascinating. Worth (or, Jenny Lee at the time) lived in a convent with nuns who ran the midwife/nursing for the poor, slummy area of the East End, and she helped to take care of pregnant women and delivered babies in these crowded, dirty, dilapidated flats. The book is made up of stories of individual births and gritty experiences of the times, and also stories about the nuns and the other nurses who worked in the convent and the neighborhood. This is NOT necessarily a feed-good story though--there are some pretty sad/horrific chapters on prostitution (Worth meets and rescues a pregnant prostitute and hears her whole story), abuse, terrible living conditions. But there are also wonderful, happy people that she meets and sweet stories about happy, living babies and families. I thought it was a super interesting perspective and time in history, and I'm glad I got the chance to read it--but I don't feel the need to read the sequels (it's a trilogy).