I love this show. I love the history, and although brutal at times, I love learning about how medicine was and seeing how much it progressed.
If you have not seen this show, you should. It’s heartwarming, heartbreaking, gut wrenching, and full of love and laughter all at once. There are currently 12 seasons and the show is still running!
The beginning of the show was actually based off of a real woman’s memoir that she wrote called Call the Midwife: A True Story of the East End in the 1950s, and the rest of the show is adapted from that. I believe the show is now to the 1960s era in season 11 (that’s as far as I’ve seen, I have not seen season 12 yet!)
The cast changes a bit throughout the seasons but the show never loses your attention, and they make you love each character more and more. The writers did a phenomenal job at showing gripping stories. This show made me cry many times, and that is not common for me.
Although this show is about midwives, there is much more that happens, they are nurses too so they don’t just deal with babies!
About the setting…
We start off following a young nurse (Jenny) who moved to the East End of London in the 1950s. She was brought up in a well to do family and did not know what to expect, moving to one of the poorest areas in London.
She thinks she is going to be nursing in a clinic, but she soon finds herself at the door of a convent. She would be working with nuns at Nonnatus House. (Nuns back then were the first midwives, and were a private medical practice.)
Jenny has a hard time adjusting to the surroundings, and to the community, but she becomes a very confident and capable nurse, with the help of her fellow midwives/nurses and nuns.
We follow along with the stories of about 5 nurses and about 3-4 nuns and the local doctor and his son, and their daily struggles to help the people of the east end.
This is an absolutely amazing show, it is very well written and presented. The medical tools are accurate, and so are the medical outbreaks of the time such as polio, diphtheria, and even the crisis of the drug thalidomide that caused severe deformities in newborn babies.
This show pulls at your heartstrings at every turn, whether it’s a story about love, or tragedy. I give this one a 10/10 score!
Enjoy your weekend!
~A
Ink & Embers 
Absolutely. This has always been one of my favorites, too!
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