Call the Midwife.

[Toddlerteaplease]

Anyone watching? Dr smug unfortunately appears fully recovered from the train crash.

Also called the heart attack - ‘indigestion’ is never that on TV

Exactly! It reminded me of that Mitchell and Webb sketch where a cough turns out to be just a cough

I think it would be quite sad if Lucille came back 7/8 months pregnant or with a baby...it would be like she'd cut Cyril out of one of the biggest things to happen to them as a couple, the planning together for when the baby arrived and the opportunity for him to support her during the pregnancy.

I think it would be nice if Cyril and Lucille could work through their infertility as a couple, go through the grief but also have fulfilling life without children. Every other tv couple facing infertility either miraculously gets pregnant or a conveniently abandoned baby drops into their lap cough Shelagh and Dr Turner cough and it’s just not true to life

My sister had her 5th child at 28 in the 2000s, and really had to fight to be taken seriously for a sterilisation.

A couple of my friends both had their 4th child aged 28 in 1985 and were both sterilised a few month later.

And surely no age is too young if another birth could be fatal!

I must admit I was a bit bemused.

“You must never get pregnant again. There is a high chance you will die if you do”

”sterilise me”

”no you’re too young”

Yes, the "too young to be sterilised" comment was ridiculous. If you have a medical condition that means pregnancy is highly dangerous when you were young, then that risk is only likely to get worse as you get older. The only vaguely logical explanation for the comment would be if there was a potential cure for the underlying condition on the horizon, but that wouldn't have been the case for rheumatic heart disease in the 60s, even for superdoc Turner!
Given the number of children the couple in question already had and the wife's health I would have expected the Obstetricians at St Cuthbert's to have been advising sterilisation in fact.
A far more sensible storyline if they wanted to shoe horn Dr T's vasectomy lecture in would have been to say that the husband being sterilised would avoid the risks of anaesthesia and surgery to the wife. Now that would have been a sigificant consideration, given the anaesthetic drugs available at the time and the fact that sterilisation would have been a bigger operation than it is now as it would have been an open procedure, not laparoscopic.

How did I not know this? Grim stuff 🐸

Why did they inject toads with wee? How did it prove anything?

Not too keen to Google. Not sure what it might throw up!

If I remember right... the hormones in a pregnant animals wee would make another animal ovulate.

I just googled it out of curiosity and it was frogs.

They would start producing eggs if the urine was positive.

How interesting

I assumed the sterilisation thing was a symptom of patriarchal medicine and doctors gatekeeping - necessary - procedures for women. Like we'd seen earlier in the series on doctors' rounds in the hospital - patients not having much agency (even male ones like Jimmy). I don't know if that still would've been the case in the late 60s, it seems possible.

Would the woman in question have been expected to use contraception instead and pregnancy viewed as her failing to take responsibility for her condition? Maybe I'm being too harsh.

Would Lucille have flown back and forth to Jamaica at the time or were people still travelling by boat? I assumed international airfares would be out of reach for most working people until the 70s.

*in earlier series

The Turners flew to South Africa at the end of 1961..

They'd be far more affluent, though? Cyril and Lucille seem to be just scraping by in their tiny flat, they're still very much at the starting out phase.

My mum's cousin worked as a cabin steward on liners to South Africa in the 1960s. Flying must have been very expensive.

Didn't they all go? Was there a Christmas special in South Africa?

I seem to remember the turners flew (due to the kids) but the others had to go by boat.

Would the woman in question have been expected to use contraception instead and pregnancy viewed as her failing to take responsibility for her condition? Maybe I'm being too harsh.

Don't think you are right. The contraceptive pill was fairly new, so the only other reliable form of contraception was condoms.

Would Lucille have flown back and forth to Jamaica at the time or were people still travelling by boat? I assumed international airfares would be out of reach for most working people until the 70s.

Flying would have been doable but expensive. Did Lucille fly back and forth, or is this her first trip home? Lucille and Cyril are a childless couple with good jobs and no vices who are paying a low rent, so would have been able to save. I thought they used the money they were saving for a house deposit to pay for Lucille's fare.

May’s birth mother has mysteriously gone vanished even though she seemed keen to stay in touch :(

Mays birth mother is back in Hong Kong. Contact will just be letters.

Who the hell discovered that this is a thing!?

Cyril said to Fred about her booking her flight home- I think he told her he'd got her an open-ended ticket when he gave it to her and that he'd taken money from their savings.

He doesn't have a low paying job anymore, he became a civil engineer for the council last series.

Anyone else wonder what Dr. T and Sheila do for childcare? They've three small kids. I don't think creches were really a thing back then. Does Sheila just work school hours? But how would they manage during the school holidays? Do they pay a childminder? Obviously they'd an au pair at one stage but that didn't work out.

Also, have they cloned Dr. T? He seems to be everywhere. I mean, he's a GP but he turns up at lots of the home births also. He seems to work 24/7.

I still enjoy the programme but I really miss the original midwives - Jenny and Chummy and Barbara etc. I thought Trixie's character had more of a personality when the series started. In recent episodes she's been a bit distant - like she's lost her sparkle. I loved Sr. Monica Joan in the earlier programmes and some of the dementia storylines were very touching, but now she's just plain irritating. Phyllis and Millicent are probably my favourite characters at the moment.

I vaguely remember a reference to "Granny Somebody says she can have the children for an extra few days" kind of thing.
But she doesn't have any family and his parents would have to be about 90??