The Blue Cotton Gown: A Midwife's Memoir - Hardcover

Harman, Patricia

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0807072893 ISBN 13: 9780807072899

Publisher: Beacon Pr, 2008

Synopsis

Heather is pale and thin, seventeen and pregnant with twins when Patricia Harman begins to care for her. Over the course of the next five seasons Patsy will see Heather through the loss of both babies and their father. She will also care for her longtime patient Nila, pregnant for the eighth time and trying to make a new life without her abusive husband. And Patsy will try to find some comfort to offer Holly, whose teenage daughter struggles with bulimia. She will help Rebba learn to find pleasure in her body and help Kaz transition into a new body. She will do noisy battle with the IRS in the very few moments she has to spare, and wage her own private battle with uterine cancer.

Patricia Harman, a nurse-midwife, manages a women’s health clinic with her husband, Tom, an ob-gyn, in West Virginia—a practice where patients open their hearts, where they find care and sometimes refuge. Patsy’s memoir juxtaposes the tales of these women with her own story of keeping a small medical practice solvent and coping with personal challenges. Her patients range from Appalachian mothers who haven’t had the opportunity to attend secondary school to Ph.D.’s on cell phones. They come to Patsy’s small, windowless exam room and sit covered only by blue cotton gowns, and their infinitely varied stories are in equal parts heartbreaking and uplifting. The nurse-midwife tells of their lives over the course of a year and a quarter, a time when her outwardly successful practice is in deep financial trouble, when she is coping with malpractice threats, confronting her own serious medical problems, and fearing that her thirty-year marriage may be on the verge of collapse. In the words of Jacqueline Mitchard, this memoir, “utterly true and lyrical as any novel . . . should be a little classic.”

About this title

Review:

"In her sweetly perceptive memoir, Harman reveals how her exam room becomes a confessional. Coaxing women in thin gowns to share secrets ... she reminds them that they're not alone."--Michelle Green, People

"Harman has a gift for storytelling, and The Blue Cotton Gown is a moving, percipient book."--Karen R. Long, Cleveland Plain Dealer

"Harman shows us the joys and sorrows of listening to women's stories and attending to their bodies, and she leads us through the complicated life of a healer who is profoundly shaped by her patients and their journeys."--Perri Klass, author of The Mercy Rule and Treatment Kind and Fair

"Luminescent, ruthlessly authentic, humane, and brilliantly written."--Samuel Shem, MD, author of The House of God, Mount Misery, and The Spirit of the Place

"Touchingly revelatory . . . deeply moving."--Booklist, starred review

"As the mother of seven children and veteran of eight pregnancy losses, I knew when I ran my bath that I would be unable to resist Patricia Harman's memoir of midwifery, The Blue Cotton Gown. What I didn't realize was that it would cause me, a sensible person, to get into her bath with one sock still on and rise from it when the candle was gone and the water cold. Utterly true and lyrical as any novel, Harman's book should be a little classic."--Jacquelyn Mitchard, author of The Deep End of the Ocean and Cage of Stars

About the Author:

Patricia Harman, CNM, has published in The Journal of Midwifery & Women's Health and The Journal of Sigma Theta Tau for Nursing Scholarship as well as alternative publications. She is a regular presenter at national midwifery conferences. Harman got her start as a lay-midwife on the rural communes where she lived in the '60s and '70s, going on to become a nurse-midwife on the faculty of Ohio State University, Case Western Reserve University, and West Virginia University. She lives and works near Morgantown, West Virginia, and has three sons.

About this edition

• Publisher: Beacon Pr
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 0807072893
• ISBN 13: 9780807072899
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 290