Similarly, the varying roles of the nurses of Nonnatus House—including home visits for the elderly and infirm as well as prenatal care—would have been representative of the kind of work nurses during the time period would have done as part of the National Health Service or NHS. The NHS was instituted after the end of WWII as part of the UK's welfare state in an effort to ensure that all Britains had access to medical care.

The East End in Call the Midwife looks a lot like the real neighborhood of the time. Sophie Mutevelian In 'Shadows of the Workhouse', Ms. Worth relates a number of heartbreaking stories of people she met who had been housed in these workhouses; and it was clear that if you had the misfortune of entering these institutions as a child, you would come out of the experience forever changed and sometimes irreparably broken. Ms. Worth writes…."For the working class, life was nasty, brutal and short. Hunger and hardships were expected. Men were old at forty. women worn out at thirty-five. The death of children were taken for granted. Poverty was frankly regarded as a moral defect……" a very powerful and moving account of life in Britain from the early 20th century to the late 1950s My only criticism of the book would be that parts of it had a little bit too much detail, but then when I write myself I include lots of detail so I can understand the pleasure in recording minute details.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 talks about the experiences of the people she worked with as a nurse, some such as Jane who is an extremely neurotic woman , who lived though the horrors and cruelty of the workhouse as a child. the workhouse system was a truly cruel one.

Jennifer lived and worked with the nuns of St. John the Divine. Later, she would draw upon these memories to write a trilogy of memoirs concerning life as a midwife in the East End, at a time where post-war poverty and suffering was rife, unmarried mothers were scorned and there was a severe shortage of housing due to the Blitz, which led to intolerable living conditions for many families. Ted became a loving and wonderful father to Edward without actually being his biological father. How important is biology in the parent–child relationship? In 1930 the workhouses were closed by Act of Parliament -- officially, that is. But in practice it was impossible to close them. They housed thousands of people who had nowhere else to live. Such people could not be turned out into the streets. Apart from that, many of them had been in the workhouses for so long, subject to the discipline and routine, that they were completely institutionalized, and could not have adjusted to the outside world... I regret that I have not been able to get to know the men of the East End. But it is quite impossible. I belong to the women's world, to the taboo subject of childbirth. The men are polite and respectful to us midwives, but completely withdrawn from any familiarity, let alone friendship. There is a total divide between what is called men's work and women's work. So, like Jane Austen, who in her writing never recorded a conversation between two men alone, because as a woman she could not know what exclusively male conversation would be like, I cannot record much about the men of Poplar, beyond superficial observation." In the Midst of Life (Jennifer Worth, RN RM, published in 2010 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson and then Phoenix/Orion in 2011). .

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I don't think James Herriot would have had a graphic description of group sex, including blow jobs. I understand this was a section of the book about prostitution but that scene really seemed to not fit the tone of the book up to that point. It felt gratuitous.