The Ghost Midwife

London, England. 1679. When a maid becomes the focus of ghostly events that alarm the servants of Rotten Row, she can't leave. There's no place to go. She must expose a murder most foul or bear the consequences... Page-turning ghost story based on a 17th century ballad.

Haunted has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher.

With Sandra Dallas's incomparable gift for creating a sense of time and place and characters that capture your heart, The Last Midwife tells the story of family, community, and the secrets that can destroy and unite them. It is 1880 and Gracy Brookens is the only midwife in a small Colorado mining town where she has delivered hundreds, maybe thousands, of babies in her lifetime. The women of Swandyke trust and depend on Gracy, and most couldn't imagine getting through pregnancy and labor without her by their sides. But everything changes when a baby is found dead...and the evidence points to Gracy as the murderer. She didn't commit the crime, but clearing her name isn't so easy when her innocence is not quite as simple, either. She knows things, and that's dangerous. Invited into her neighbors' homes during their most intimate and vulnerable times, she can't help what she sees and hears. A woman sometimes says things in the birthing bed, when life and death seem suspended within the same moment. Gracy has always tucked those revelations away, even the confessions that have cast shadows on her heart. With her friends taking sides and a trial looming, Gracy must decide whether it's worth risking everything to prove her innocence. And she knows that her years of discretion may simply demand too high a price now...especially since she's been keeping more than a few dark secrets of her own.

Ghostbelly is Elizabeth Heineman’s personal account of a home birth that goes tragically wrong—ending in a stillbirth—and the harrowing process of grief and questioning that follows. It’s also Heineman’s unexpected tale of the loss of a newborn: before burial, she brings the baby home for overnight stays. Does this sound unsettling? Of course. We’re not supposed to hold and caress dead bodies. But then again, babies aren’t supposed to die. In this courageous and deeply intimate memoir, Heineman examines the home-birth and maternal health-care industry, the isolation of midwives, and the scripting of her own grief. With no resolution to sadness, Heineman and her partner learn to live in a new world: a world in which they face each day with the understanding of the fragility of the present.

This book addresses the narrative construction of places, the relationship between tradition communities and their environments, the supernatural dimensions of cultural landscapes and wilderness as they are manifested in European folklore and in early literary sources, such as the Old Norse sagas. The first section “Explorations in Place-Lore” discusses cursed and sacred places, churches, graveyards, haunted houses, cemeteries, grave mounds, hill forts, and other tradition dominants in the micro-geography of the Nordic and Baltic countries, both retrospectively and from synchronous perspectives. The supernaturalisation of places appears as a socially embedded set of practices that involves storytelling and ritual behaviour. Articles show, how places accumulate meanings as they are layered by stories and how this shared knowledge about environments can actualise in personal experiences. Articles in the second section “Regional Variation, Environment and Spatial Dimensions” address ecotypes, milieu-morphological adaptation in Nordic and Baltic-Finnic folklores, and the active role of tradition bearers in shaping beliefs about nature as well as attitudes towards the environment. The meaning of places and spatial distance as the marker of otherness and sacrality in Old Norse sagas is also discussed here. The third section of the book “Traditions and Histories Reconsidered” addresses major developments within the European social histories and mentalities. It scrutinizes the history of folkloristics, its geopolitical dimensions and its connection with nation building, as well as looking at constructions of the concepts Baltic, Nordic and Celtic. It also sheds light on the social base of folklore and examines vernacular views toward legendry and the supernatural.

The Student’s Guide to Becoming a Midwife is essential reading for all student midwives. Now updated to include the latest 2012 NMC Midwifery Rules and Standards and a brand new chapter on the midwife and public health, this comprehensive resource provides a wide range of need-to-know information for student midwives, including: Effective communication and documentation Confidentiality Interdisciplinary working The fundamentals of antenatal, intrapartum, and postnatal care Assessment and examination of the new-born baby Medicines Public health Clinical decision-making Evidence-based practice With case studies, words of wisdom from current midwives and a range of activities and self-test questions throughout – making it easy to learn and understand key concepts – The Student’s Guide to Becoming a Midwife is the ideal companion for students throughout their course.

The NMC have produced standards of proficiency for pre registration midwifery education and those standards have been written in an “academic” language, for higher education institutions. Each student prior to being admitted to the profession must have achieved the proficiencies stated in the NMC publication. The purpose of this book is to provide students with material related to the standards of midwifery education. The students will be able to use the contents of this text and relate it to their own approved programme of midwifery study, as their programme of study would have had to comply with NMC’s requirements. It will help student midwives appreciate how their own programmes have been designed, and why they are required to study and understand some of the subjects they are, or will be studying.