Baby Catcher: Chronicles of a Modern Midwife

In this engaging account of her career as a midwife, Peggy Vincent describes the often hilarious, sometimes frightening, events surrounding the appearance of a new human being. Vincent, who delivered nearly three thousand babies, allows readers to peak over her shoulder as she rushes from the hospital delivery of a teenage welfare morn to the home of an astrologer married to a paraplegic; helps a mother give birth on a leaky sailboat during a raging storm; and tends the home birth of a woman who spends her labor trying to keep her hyper doctor-father from burning the house down.

More than a collection of unforgettable stories, Baby Catcher is also a clarion call for a less technological, more personalized approach to childbirth in this country.