Call The Midwife: A True Story Of The East End In The 1950S

PREFACE

In January 1998 the Midwives Journal published an article by Terri Coates entitled “Impressions of the Midwife in Literature”. After careful research, Terri was forced to conclude that midwives are virtually non-existent in literature.

Why, in heaven’s name? Fictional doctors strut across the pages of books in droves, scattering pearls of wisdom as they pass. Nurses, good and bad, are by no means absent. But midwives? Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine?

Yet midwifery is in itself the very stuff of drama and melodrama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain and suffering followed by joy or tragedy and anguish. A midwife attends every birth; she is in the thick of it, she sees it all. Why, then, does she remain a shadowy figure, hidden behind the delivery room door?

Terri Coates ended her article with the words: “Maybe there is a midwife somewhere who can do for midwifery what James Herriot did for veterinary practice.”

I read those words and took up the challenge.

Jennifer Worth