NONFICTION

 

Fortnight on Maxwell Street: A Personal and Historic Portrait of the Chicago Maternity Center is the true story of a medical student's trial-by-fire delivering babies in Chicago's housing projects and tenements in the winter of 1968. It is an inside look at urban America's most venerable home birthing service as well as a first person account of a novice's rite of passage amid extreme poverty and racial tension. It will be completed in 2010.

Read the introduction:

 

"By the time we got there, the Chicago Maternity Center had been delivering babies in the bedrooms, dining rooms and kitchens of the poorest people in town for three quarters of a century. We were the Northwestern seniors. Mostly white and male and prosperous, we said farewell to medical student life as we knew it, and went, five or six fledglings at a time, to live and learn, round-the-clock for a fortnight, amid the black and brown underclass of the inner city.

It was late winter of 1968, in the narrow crease between the Tet offensive and LBJ’ s announcement that “I shall not seek, and I will not accept” renomination for the presidency. It was three weeks before the King assassination, when buildings would burn and National Guard tanks would roll past the front door of our temporary home.  I was three months from entering the Army Medical Corps and three miles from Grant Park, the site of the Democratic Convention melee that coming summer, where heads would crack and blood would spill in a coalescence of rage over Vietnam and Martin and Bobby. Into that tinderbox, we came to learn a little ghetto obstetrics, home deliveries in the housing projects and slum tenements of Chicago. It was enlightening, it was terrifying, it changed my life."