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."