"One wet cold night many years ago at the age of 22, a newly qualified doctor, I went to attend my first confinement. Very nervous I arrived with my new black bag. My knock was answered by the young husband, pallid and shabby, with the familiar signs of long unemployment upon him. He took me upstairs to a room stripped of all but the bare necessities of life. There lay the patient on a mattress covered by a threadbare blanket – a girl of my own age – in labour with her second child. "By the bed stood a cot...
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