Mary Renfrew: Researcher, reformer, midwife

摘要

In 1978 Mary Renfrew had just qualified as a midwife, but she was already about to quit. The beneficiary of something vanishingly rare among nurses in the UK at the time-a degree in social sciences-Renfrew had leapt into her midwifery training in Edinburgh with a "questioning spirit" and an urge to drive things forward. What she found were maternity services rooted in an intellectual mire, blindly following orthodoxy, unashamedly unquestioning. "I almost left the profession because of that", she says. Instead, she got angry. "The thing that propelled me forward was quite honestly anger. Anger at the way women and babies were being treated, in a routine, unthinking, one size fits all way", she says. Rather than surrender to the status quo, Renfrew blazed a trail as a reformer.