The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Worth gained her midwife training in the 1950s among an Anglican order of nuns dedicated to ensuring safer childbirth for the poor living amid the Docklands slums on the East End of London. Her engaging memoir retraces those early years caring for the indigent and unfortunate during the pinched postwar era in London, when health care was nearly nonexistent, antibiotics brand-new, sanitary facilities rare, contraception unreliable and families with 13 or more children the norm. Working alongside the trained nurses and midwives of St. Raymund Nonnatus (a pseudonym she's given the place), Worth made frequent visits to the tenements that housed the dock workers and their families, often in the dead of night on her bicycle. Her well-polished anecdotes are teeming with character detail of some of the more memorable nurses she worked with, such as the six-foot-two Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne, called Chummy, who renounced her genteel upbringing to become a nurse, or the dotty old Sister Monica Joan, who fancied cakes immoderately. Patients included Molly, only 19 and already trapped in poverty and degradation with several children and an abusive husband; Mrs. Conchita Warren, who was delivering her 24th baby; or the birdlike vagrant, Mrs. Jenkins, whose children were taken away from her when she entered the workhouse. (Apr.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Review

Emulating James Herriot-except with fewer cows and more cockneys- Worth sketches a warm, amiable portrait of hands-on medical practice.

The author became a midwife at age 22, learning her trade in the 1950s from the nun midwives at the convent of St. Raymund Nonnatus and working among impoverished women in the slums of the London Docklands. Her frank, sometimes graphic memoir describes scores of births, from near-catastrophes to Christmas miracles, and details her burgeoning understanding of the world and the people in it. It's stocked with charming characters: loopy sister Monica Joan, the convent's near-mystic cake-gobbler and mischief-maker; Father Joseph Williamson, focused on delivering prostitutes rather than babies; handyman/poultry salesman/drain cleaner/toffee-apple pusher Frank; and posh Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne ("Chummy"), an outrageously warm-hearted debutante who devoted her life to midwifery and missionary work. Worth depicts the rich variety of life in the slums, where loving, doting mothers of nine rubbed elbows with neglectful, broken young women turning tricks to support their husbands' night life. She draws back the veil usually placed over the process of birth, described here as both tribulation and triumph. In birth after birth, as women and midwives labored to bring babies into the world through hours of pain and occasional danger, Worth marveled at the mothers' almost- uniform embrace of their babies. "There must be an inbuilt system of total forgetfulness in a woman," she writes. "Some chemical or hormone that immediately enters the memory part of the brain after delivery, so that there is absolutely no recall of the agony that has gone before. If this were not so, no woman would ever have a second baby."

A charming tale of deliveries and deliverance.
-Kirkus Review

With deep professional knowledge of midwifery and an unerring eye for the details of life in the London slums of the Nineteen Fifties Jennifer Worth has painted a stunningly vivid picture of an era now passed."
-Patrick Taylor MD, author of the New York Times best seller An Irish Country Doctor.

"Readers will fall in love with The Midwife, a richly drawn chronicle of midwifery in the 1950's, in London's East end. Recounted with great tenderness and poignancy, Jennifer Worth's story is an affirmation of life during the best and worst of times, and a celebration of the relentless drama and awe-inspiring magic of birth."
-Elizabeth Brundage, author of Somebody Else's Daughter

"Jennifer Worth's memories of her years as a midwife in the East End were at once hilariously horrible and tremendously moving. She recounts a period when birth was both more frightening and more personal. Part of me wishes that my obstetrician had shown up at my house on a rickety old bicycle, and treated me both to a delivery and a hot cup of tea."
- Ayelet Waldman, author of Love and Other Impossible Pursuits

Worth gained her midwife training in the 1950s among an Anglican order of nuns dedicated to ensuring safer childbirth for the poor living amid the Docklands slums on the East End of London. Her engaging memoir retraces those early years caring for the indigent and unfortunate during the pinched postwar era in London, when health care was nearly nonexistent, antibiotics brand-new, sanitary facilities rare, contraception unreliable and families with 13 or more children the norm. Working alongside the trained nurses and midwives of St. Raymund Nonnatus (a pseudonym she's given the place), Worth made frequent visits to the tenements that housed the dock workers and their families, often in the dead of night on her bicycle. Her well-polished anecdotes are teeming with character detail of some of the more memorable nurses she worked with, such as the six- foot-two Camilla Fortescue-Cholmeley-Browne, called Chummy, who renounced her genteel upbringing to become a nurse, or the dotty old Sister Monica Joan, who fancied cakes immoderately. Patients included Molly, only 19 and already trapped in poverty and degradation with several children and an abusive husband; Mrs. Conchita Warren, who was delivering her 24th baby; or the birdlike vagrant, Mrs. Jenkins, whose children were taken away from her when she entered the workhouse.
- Publishers Weekly

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Penguin (Non-Classics); Reprint edition (April 7, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0143116231
• ISBN-13: 978-0143116233
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.3 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.9 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #354,542 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #100 in

  Books > History > Europe > England > London

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars You won't regret picking this book up! It'll be hard to put down., May 4, 2009

By	Story Circle Book Reviews (www.storycirclebookreviews.org) - See all my reviews

"Why did I ever start? Do I regret it?" Jennifer Worth asks herself in her memoir The Midwife. "Never, never, never. I wouldn't swap my job for anything on earth." Worth began her career as a midwife in the 1950s in the London Docklands.

The Docklands were poverty stricken, dirty, and recently bombed during World War II. People lived in condemned buildings among rats, grime, and violence. Worth worked out of a Nunnery, providing prenatal care, delivering babies in their homes, and checking up on the moms and babies afterward. It was a busy life with highly unpredictable hours.

One of the most memorable women in the book was Conchita Warren. Worth delivered two of her babies, numbers 24 and 25! The Warren family all lived together in a small London apartment. What was most remarkable--apart from the vast number of children--was the fact that Conchita spoke no English. Her soldier husband had met and married her in Spain and brought her home with him. "Quite suddenly, with blinding insight, the secret of their blissful marriage was revealed to me," Worth wrote. "She couldn't speak a word of English, and he couldn't speak a word of Spanish!"

Some readers may be turned off by the subject, fearing gore, blood, and other unpleasant things often associated with birth. But this is one book you don't want to judge by its cover. The Midwife is, more than anything, the story of an amazing woman in 1950s London and the people she met. I recommend this book to anyone interested in history, motivating stories, or who just wants a good read.

by Jennifer Melville
for Story Circle Book Reviews
reviewing books by, for, and about women

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating tale of birth, life, and death in London's grimy East End, April 10, 2009

By	Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 10 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

Jennifer Worth went to work as a midwife trainee, then fully-qualified midwife in London's grimy East End district in the 50's. Though this is post-WWII Britain, the story could read as something out of Dickens. The East End cockneys are mainly dock workers who have a work-feast-or-famine existence and birth control was all but unknown. They relied on midwives from local charity institutions such as religious orders both Catholic and Church-of-England to provide pre-, post- and neonatal care.

The author rides to visit her patients on bicycle, bringing a kit that can fit on the basket. The conditions are sometimes horrendous--and the situations life-threatening for the women giving birth. Yet the midwives prevail in some very astonishing situations with simple techniques that would amaze current medical professionals.

My favorite story was of the couple who had the happiest of marriages and about 18 kids--because the wife and husband spoke different languages. They were of the poorest, but they managed remarkably well considering their situation.

This is a good book to read in contrast to Spiritual Midwifery by Ina May Gaskin. Both deal with natural childbirth, and how different the situations. Ms. Gaskin is wife of the founder of the Farm Commune and her fame as a midwife coach is world reknown. I'd recommend you read both of these if you are interested in the subject.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Well-told Tale. Five Stars!, August 27, 2009

By	James Denny "History Guy1" (Catonsville, Maryland) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Jennifer Worth's tale of her time as a midwife in the Docklands of London's East End in the 1950's reads more like a Dickensian novel from the 1850's. Early in the book, she explains that by the early 1960's, the East-ender Cockney culture and dockworker-dominated economy in this part of London came quietly to an end. Until then, this culture had sustained itself for more than 100 years with little change, highly insulated from outside influences.

"The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy and Hard Times" is much more than a tale of delivering babies. It is a work of history and anthropology as well as a personal memoir. The chapter-by-chapter blend of all these elements is told by a woman with a keen eye to all that she saw and experienced. No detail escapes her sharp perception along with a skilled ability to weave these details into a cultural context. Each chapter is a story unto itself. The chapters roll up to an epic tale.

Why did this culture end in the early 1960's? Worth offers up three reasons for this early in her book: loss of dockyard jobs; demolition of the tenements; and finally, arrival of the pill resulting in much smaller family size.

Huge families were the norm in the Docklands of the East End in the 1950's just as they had been for many decades. Families typically lived in two or three-room tenements, some without running water and most without a bathroom. No one practiced birth control. Young people married young.

Many of the tenement blocks were built in the 1840's and 1850's and those that surived World War II bombing had undergone little structural alteration in the years since. This was the type of living that would support a modest working-class family at a level that allowed a measure of dignity in an era that was still largely missing the social support systems and welfare culture that is Britain today.

With rudimentary nursing skills, Worth affiliated with a church order that provided midwifery services to the women in families which fully embraced this culture. This was an era when most working-class women still gave birth at home rather than in hospital. The midwives performed essential services to people who would otherwise have gone largely without service at all. Most of their skills were the skills of midwives who learned by experience and mentoring not through academic or technical medical education.

Her tale is also about what life was like at the nunnery and why she enjoyed the lifestyle and companionship much more than she ever could have had she been a nurse in a hospital.

For a bonus, at the end of the book there is a fascinating appendix on Cockney language terms and expressions, their derivation and use.

"The Midwife" is a well-told tale of what is now a bygone era. Five Stars!