Call the Midwife

Hmm.... I might watch the first one and see how I get on. I did give up the last series cos the writing was so bad.

Scream, the GP has found another cause to champion and wonder of wonders has got two patients on his list that are affected. What are the odds!!??

I forgot it was on! I will give it a go and see what I think but it's likely to be the last one I see.

Shocking isn't it and just not fathomable. GP has one patient with a deformed still birth and he has his wife trailing through back copies of The Lancet. I've got a system she says, err would that be trailing through back copies of The Lancet?! Oh, says he, it might be the BMJ and all she does is give him a coy look.

There is no way after one patient he would link this to radiation exposure. It wasn't until about 1998 that govts started to admit this may have caused the issue.

A GP like him working within the Maternity Hospital in the 60s would see quite a few still births and several deformities a year and I have no doubt would give the deformity as evidence for the stillbirth, as would the midwives.

Besides why is he working in the Maternity Hospital. By the 60s, if not the 50s, it would have been staffed by obstetricians from the NHS and he may have occasionally been on call, if he wanted to earn some extra money, but these hospitals had doctors sleeping in on night shifts and junior doctors on the rota with consultants doing daily ward rounds. They also typically had ambulances on standby outside with anyone who had any concerns being transferred to the main hospital before delivery if possible. It's London for goodness sake, not the Lake District, they had a choice of hospitals to choose from all easily accessible from the East End.

Apparently they've confirmed another series.

The character actors have disappeared or their roles have shrunk to the point that they're barely in it. The GP and his wife dominate. How many times have we had a gay character in this - at least one per series I think. Yet, at that time most men would have kept this so secret their GPs wouldn't know and you did not need a written referral to a VD Clinic so I have no idea what all that malarkey was about. Even in the 60s you could rock up and make your own appointment and your notes were confidentially kept there and not shared with your GP. I know, I was responsible for the archives in the VD Clinic and they went back to about 1880 (beautiful handwritten script in big ledgers).

I would also say from experience that only about half of GPs were remotely sympathetic to homosexuals and women who wanted abortions or contraception. Even in the 1980s a survey we did in Wandsworth showed that only 65% of GPs would refer a woman for an abortion and of those 35% all refused to put up a sign to inform their patients that they did not refer for abortions in their practice. What they did was try to delay the process as much as possible so as to make it virtually impossible for the women to get one.

It ruins it. There are enough things that happen in a pregnancy or delivery and other community nursing conditions for them to be the main story with the other things being peripheral.

The GP has a cause a week. Yes midwives might have known if a woman was married to a homosexual if he'd been arrested previously but not otherwise. The older gay men that used to come to the clinic occasionally weren't men that were typically effeminate or in any way different in appearance or presentation to any of the other men. Perhaps one or two were more obvious. On the whole they had ordinary jobs that men of their class and education had, at least 60% were married. Most had never been arrested or had any kind of aversion treatment, they didn't hang out in men's toilets or underground bars. They did man type hobbies that allowed them to be with other men they knew. Things like fishing/camping/walking holidays, weekends away at the football. They never got found out or arrested.

Similarly women who had backstreet abortions mostly got through them well enough and had no problems afterwards. Lots of the practitioners were well skilled, careful and hygienic. They also talked women out of it if they felt they were too far gone or under pressure. Some of them were even midwives. Lots of GPs would just prescribe antibiotics or other meds and say nothing, some of them did abortions too and certainly not every death certificate had the right cause of death on it.

Some were evil and would deliberately sterilise women if they could, even if they were 14 - none of them got prosecuted for performing an unnecessary hysterectomy on a child. I don't think we've had that storyline have we.

In CTM there are too many storylines about these issues, nearly all of which end in disaster for the woman, which couldn't have reflected reality or nobody would risk carrying one out for fear of prison and women would find someone else. .