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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She adds: “When Jennifer was alive, I wanted to cry out to her to talk to me. Perhaps she felt the same. Or perhaps she understood – as I do now – that it was what was unsaid, rather than any words that passed between us, that mattered the most. A deep and enduring love.” My heart was full of joy and sometimes heartache the whole time I was reading, just like when I watch the series. I threw my heart and soul into the book just like I do the show. Mystery and magic have always surrounded childbirth, mostly due to ignorance. Likewise midwives have been reviled and ridiculed, even feared as witches. Sex, birth, and death are still taboo subjects in varying degrees in different cultures. Were you a suffragette?” I asked. “Bah! Suffragettes. I’ve no time for suffragettes. They made the biggest mistake in history. They went for equality. They should have gone for power!”

As such, this book might usefully be required educational reading for every budding social worker, nurse, and care worker. This book is not depressing, but history is always filled with sad happenings including war, unfair treatment of the poor, women, children and infirm. This book centers on the workhouse, a Victorian solution to the poor and homeless situation that crept up soon after the Industrial Revolution. Worth died on 31 May 2011, [ where?] having been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus earlier in the year. [7] Deeply religious, she had a commitment to God. [2] The first episode of the television series Call the Midwife, based on her experiences in Poplar, London, in the late 1950s, was dedicated to her.Really enjoyed it. The stories were engrossing, the people were fascinating, and the 1950s East End setting was easy to imagine and immerse into. Worth died on 31 May 2011, having been diagnosed with cancer of the oesophagus earlier in that year. Deeply religious, she had a commitment to God. The first episode of the television series Call the Midwife, based on her experiences in Poplar, London, in the late 1950s, was dedicated to her.

In this 3rd and last volume of the “Call the Midwife” series, Jennifer Worth ties the loose ends of her first two volumes describing the hardships and joys of nursing in the East End in the 1950s. I realize Ms. Worth is a product of her time and I am trying very hard to not judge her unfairly using my time and culture as a standard. But it's difficult to ignore the ethnocentric comments sprinkled throughout the book. She described an impoverished immigrant woman as looking like a Spanish princess. Making the foreign person into something exotic is objectifying, and keeps her in the "other" category. When we got to little Mary, the teenage Irish prostitute, she is described first as a Celtic princess, then as maybe the product of an Irish "navvy" (manual laborer) and then says maybe they're the same thing. Alright. You need to stop right there, lady. This book is unfortunately problematic. I read Worth's first memoir several years ago and I enjoyed it far more, and the reason is simple: while in Call the Midwife you largely follow her personal experiences, here you rarely focus on Worth herself. It is split into three sections, each focusing on a different person (or group of people) that she knew. This book is special. It is informative, keeps you attention every second of the way and draws you in emotionally. It mixes sadness and happiness. It has a touch of philosophizing, theorizing about life and death, but this is not overdone. It makes you stop and think about how you want to die. Both the prose and the layout are excellent. Jennifer Worth's third book about her years serving as a midwife in London's East End in the 1950s was much darker than the first two. It was well-written and the stories were all compelling, but it covered some serious stuff, including babies who died during delivery, botched abortions, children killed by tuberculosis, a father who prostituted his daughter on a ship, and the Contagious Diseases Acts.

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? If you liked the series be prepared for something different. If you don't like fluffy memoirs and so avoided the Midwife books, this one is worth reading as a well-written sociological memoir of the brutal lives of those who have so little they live on the fringes of society and no one much cares. Jennifer Worth did though, and thought their lives worth documenting.