back-blocks baby-doctor.

Te Ao Hou, December 1956, Page 54

back-blocks baby-doctor. An Autobiography by Doris Gordon. Faber and Faber Ltd. 1955. Doris's childhood in Wellington was happy but unsettled, and her schooling was haphazard. Consequently, her student years were a continual struggle up the marks list from bottom to top, and her House-Surgeon days can only be described as ‘toughening’. In 1917 she graduated and married Dr Gordon. Two days later her husband was sent off to the war. Over-working as a full-time lecturer and bacteriologist cured the young bride's loneliness but threatened her with tuberculosis. When the never-to-be forgotton influenza epidemic struck in 1918 she was alone in general practice in the Taranaki backblocks. For many, this will be familiar ground, and the most absorbing part of the book. Dr Gordon's maternity work among the women living on isolated farms made her a staunch advocate of painless childbirth, and eventually she and her husband set up a private maternity hospital in Stratford. But her zeal as a Baby-Doctor took her much further afield. It was largely through her work and persistence that a chair of Obstetrics and Gynaecology was founded at Otago Medical School, and the Queen Mary's Maternity Hospital built in Dunedin. This excitingly written autobiography gives the lay reader a very good idea of the labour that goes into a successful medical career, but the most remarkable thing between its covers is the vital and indomitable personality of the woman who wrote it. —J. C. Sturm.