Culture

The Rise and Fall of National Women’s Hospital: A History is exactly that. Author Linda Bryder covers the history of the National Women’s Hospital in Auckland, beginning with the political and social circumstances that led to the hospital’s opening in 1946, and ending with the conditions that led to it becoming a unit of Auckland City Hospital rather than an independent entity. The in-between chapters each take an issue of healthcare, such as fertility or premature birth, and cover how this issue was treated over the decades the hospital was running. Bryder covers a variety of ethical dilemmas and political squabbles, using the existence of the hospital as a focus to explore broader issues of medicine’s relationship to women.

Rather dishearteningly, nearly every issue Bryder raises is still a point of contention today. People are just as likely today as they were in the forties to debate whether it’s worth trying to keep premature babies alive. Sex education is still poorly implemented, thanks to people who insist that teenagers will only try to have sex if they are taught how to do so safely. What women want from their hospital experiences and what they get is still a Venn diagram with an unsatisfactory degree of overlap. Women in this country still have to meet arbitrary, if poorly enforced, standards in order to get an abortion. Hospitals remain over-crowded, under-funded places of stress and misery, although it’s less likely that a nurse will slap you than apparently it once was. It’s not all doom and gloom — we’ve gotten much better at keeping babies alive, for instance — but a lot of this book shows just how inevitable progress isn’t.

Bryder, as generally befits a historian, keeps her views on these issues practically invisible. Some of the arguments made by historical figures in this book induce in me icy contempt, but Bryder manages to retain seeming impartiality around these hot-button issues with remarkable equanimity. The lone exception is her view of the Cartwright Inquiry, which was an important legal case that served as one of the harbingers of doom for the National Women’s Hospital’s independence. Bryder staunchly asserts that it was the result of journalistic misunderstanding and essentially a scandal about nothing; Bryder’s written a whole other book about the event.

This history is also filled with delightful minutiae. The New Zealand Family Planning Association was originally called the Sex Hygiene and Birth Regulation Society, which means there’s an alternate reality where I used to bunk off high school to accompany my friends to Sex Hygiene. Someone once seriously said that the husband being present while the wife gave birth would ensure their marriage became “indestructible for all time” and was not met with howls of laughter. In 1948, five per cent of people seeking treatment for infertility had not actually managed to have the sort of sex that results in conception.

The Rise and Fall of National Women’s Hospital is fascinating, although it isn’t going to make you feel completely positive about the advancement of the human race. It simultaneously tells the story of incredible progress while making it hard to feel like we’ve really gotten anywhere. National Women’s Hospital began with successful fund-raising and ended with far too many cockroaches; I do hope it’s not an allegory about humanity.