About the Author and the Text

A. J. Cronin (1896–1981) was a Scottish novelist who trained and practised as a doctor before turning to full-time writing. His years as a physician — including work among the coal-mining communities of South Wales — gave his fiction its close, authentic feeling for medicine and for ordinary working people. His best-known novel, The Citadel (1937), follows the career and conscience of a young doctor and is credited with influencing public debate about medical ethics and health care.

About the text. Birth is an excerpt from The Citadel. In it, Andrew Manson, freshly qualified and newly appointed as an assistant to Dr Edward Page in the small Welsh mining town of Blaenelly, is called out near midnight to attend a difficult childbirth. Returning low-spirited from a disappointing evening with Christine, the girl he loves, he is met by Joe Morgan, a burly driller whose wife Susan — married nearly twenty years — is at last expecting their first child. What follows is a long, exhausting struggle in a poor upstairs bedroom, in which Andrew must fight to save both a collapsing mother and a child born apparently lifeless. The extract shows the gap between medicine learnt from textbooks and medicine practised at the bedside, and ends with Andrew's quiet, overwhelming realisation that he has at last done something real.