III. Amazons — and Others

When I came to the practice, thirty years ago, some babies were delivered at home in partnership with the district midwife. In the network of little streets, obstetrics took its place in the work as a matter of course, and the ability to stitch up the torn perineum of the tired mother lying in the lithotomy position on a sagging mattress, in the middle of the night, with poor lighting, was essential. My senior partner regarded all this as an impoverished vestige of the heroic days when delivery at home, including the application of forceps by the general practitioner, was the rule.

Before domiciliary obstetrics died out in the practice – and a demanding but most enjoyable part of the work went with it – I attended a small group of women whose insistence on home delivery could not be denied. I thought of them as ‘the Amazons’. I was confirmed in this fanciful idea by the definition I found in the classical dictionary: ‘a people of female warriors, always situated on the borders of the known world, who provide for offspring by mating at certain seasons with men of another race’. These women, who dwelt in condemned property by the canal and the railway bridge, without men, often mated with West Indians and bore their children.

Home confinement was already against the trend in family practice, and their pregnancies aggravated their conflict with the authorities who were alarmed by the dilapidation of their homes as well as the risks of multiparity. On the other hand, the District Midwives were eager for cases, both for their own satisfaction and to train their students. As I was aquiescent, the Amazons were able to have their way.

I admired certain qualities in them, which I supposed made the original Amazons so fascinating to the poets of antiquity. According to my dictionary, this was ‘the piquant contrast between their feminine beauty and their manly employments’. In the present case, this idealised both their beauty and their employments, for the truth was that they we