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Summary Of The Birth House By Ami Mckay

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The Birth House written by Ami McKay is a compelling story which follows the lives of a young girl named Dora Rare, who is from a small rural village in Nova Scotia. Dora is first introduced as being a quiet and shy girl who has her life turned upside down when she is reintroduced to Marie Babineau, a Louisianan women who had moved to Dora’s community in hopes of being able to use her “magic” to make sure community are able to have at home births.( McKay 2006 pg. 7). The story essentially follows the lives of these two women who are struggling to be recognized as midwives as well as individuals who can treat diseases the old fashioned way with herbs and spices during a time period where we begin to see modern medicine emerge.
We see the …show more content…

Like mentioned before since it cost so much for women in the community to travel to doctor Thomas they would just refuse. Something different which I found in terms of the book and our course material is that if there was a complication from a homebirth that Dr. Thomas had refused to even see the patient (McKay pg. 230). We didn’t talk about this in class but it made me question how true that was as doctors are typically willing to do anything in terms of making money. With medicalizing pregnancy and births, in the time period, the book was set in was a time where women had no control over their bodies, this then allowed men in the community and doctors to make medical decisions for a …show more content…

When looking at the reading further and seeing that there are very similarities to topics we have covered in our course thus far. So I do believe in terms of the medical/ health aspects of the book I see it being credible. With that being said though, this is where I struggled, at first I believed the book was very much credible. However, when I started to do further research I found out it was a historical fiction story. From this, I stand firmly believing that in terms of the overall story being credible, it is not. Although the historical and medical aspects of it are very much so shown in our history, the author could have written the rest of the story in whichever way she wanted in order to drag readers

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