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cnmellen
Oct 23, 2013cnmellen rated this title 5 out of 5 stars
As a real life midwife who worked in New York City hospitals for more than two decades and delivered some 1,400 babies, I congratulate and thank author Manning from the bottom of my heart for her beautiful novel, "My Notorious Life." The complexities of being a midwife, as she put it, meaning weighing the patients' needs against the "morality," convention and law of the time, resonated deeply with me. These issues are as timely today as they were more than a century ago. The birth and abortion scenes in the book were vivid. But I am curious why the author did not describe the correct way to deliver a placenta or how the midwife would cleanse her hands before a procedure, since hemorrhage and infection, the most frequent causes of maternal mortality, could often be averted with proper hygiene and delivery of the afterbirth. These are just technical points. I loved the book and will recommend it to all my friends, both midwives and others.