Post-it Sunday Medical fiction series 4/20/25- Call the Midwife- in the Shadows of the Workhouse by Jennifer Worth

I am not sure if you are aware of a wonderful BBC show about midwives in the late 1950s. It is called Call the Midwife and is about women and Anglican nuns and the midwives who attended them. Through the post WWII population boom in East London and the attendant struggles of women and midwives with overcrowding and money struggles that they had. It is in its 14th season and has been renewed for a 15th season.

The episodes also aired on PBS, on delay.

I loved this show when I was still watching television.

Melodramatic? Yes.

Melancholic? Yes, mothers and children die from what is now preventable diseases.

There isn’t a so called woman’s issue they won’t touch. Often with great delicacy, sometimes with a mallet to the head.

I am not alone in adoring this series.

But first it was a series of books. I have them in various forms.

The one I want to write about today is the third in the series about the workhouses that the indigent were sent to. Each were ruled by a man who didn’t take any pushback and certainly didn’t spare the child. If you know that I mean.

I chose this book out of my stack of medical fiction or non-fiction books at random and re-read it.

I had forgotten that the first part of the book is about three people who were brought up by the workhouses and their different troubles.

What struck me most at this re-reading was the chapter where one of the three is dying. He doesn’t want his sister to be told of how sick he is.

But the home nurse knows and goes on to expand on how in hospitals, where she trained, no one died alone. No one died in the dark.

I had to stop reading for a moment. Because that is how I feel.

When I was a med surg nurse, I would have patients who were expected to die. Of course I did. I would get such push back on keeping a dim light on, even the one over the sink. Those who pushed back on me about having the light on when the person dying in the bed wasn’t even conscious enough to be aware of it never understood my feeling that people should not die in the dark.

Jennifer Worth, the author gets it. She write that unconsciousness might not be a state of unknowing. How are we to know what they are experiencing? The light might be comforting to the dying. A reminder that they are not unnoticed and unwatched and unloved.

I recommend the series wholeheartedly.

I can recommend reading the books at least once. There are nuances that come across on the page that are sensationalized and or missed on the screen.

However, re-reading the books after 24 years in the trenches, I would rather watch the show.