Henry Jellett was Master of the Rotunda at the time of this story, and his textbook would have been the prescribed text for the hospital staff. Nurse Power has the text ‘Jellett’s Midwifery’ at her elbow to help her manage her patients. Dr. The author has certainly done lots of homework.

In each of the four chapters, the reader gets a minute-by-minute description of the progress of Nurse Power’s patients in the makeshift ‘Maternity/Fever’ ward. The chapters are named Red, Brown, Blue, Black, after the sequence of skin discolourations which occur as the influenza virus overwhelms the body’s capacity to maintain oxygenation, from initial cyanosis, until death. Nurse Power has as her helper an untrained young volunteer named Bridie Sweeney, who had been taken on as a ‘runner’ to help with menial tasks in the chaotic milieu of overcrowded wards with understaffed, overworked midwives and doctors. The novel’s narrator is an experienced dedicated midwife, Julia Power, turning thirty (‘have I left it too late?’ she muses), whom we follow through three utterly exhausting twelve-hour shifts, caring for several women who have contracted the Spanish flu while pregnant. I undertook my obstetrical training there, from 1969-1973, so I know it well, and recognise many of the features described in the novel’s anonymous hospital as being peculiar to the Rotunda. The setting for most of the action is an unnamed major public maternity hospital on Dublin’s down-at-heel northside (but there is only one such hospital, then as now, so I’m puzzled why the author avoided naming it, and even gives it a false motto- perhaps there’s a story there). I’m confident that the hospital in the story is the world famous Dublin Lying-in Hospital, better known as the Rotunda Hospital (named for the copper cupola over its roof, not for the abdominal profile of its attendees). So what can I add to those reviews? Not much I feel, except that as I have a professional familiarity with the setting of the novel, perhaps a personal insight into certain aspects of this absorbing story might add something to complement other reviews.īriefly, the story covers three days in 1918 (October 31 – November 1) in Dublin, at the height of the Spanish flu epidemic, and just ten days before Armistice day.

Since the publication of this novel in July this year, at the height of our first wave of the Australian COVID-19 epidemic, there have been many reviews, mostly very flattering, including one written by Frank O’Shea (a member of the Tinteán editorial team) for the Canberra Times.

The pull of the stars review