Product Description
Reveille and Redemption can be read at many different levels. At one level, it’s historical fiction. Although all characters in the book are fictitious, and their names metaphorical, Reveille and Redemption nevertheless accurately portrays obstetrical care in American hospitals during the latter part of an era spanning the years from the 1940s through the 1960s, characterized in the novel as the dark age of hospital obstetrics. Reveille and Redemption is also a sociological novel about hospital bureaucracies of the era, elucidating the untoward effects of bureaucratic organization and mentality on patient care. And the novel is feminist in the sense that it analyzes the uses and abuses of women during the dark age. At its most profound level, Reveille and Redemption is a theological novel about original sin and the banality of evil. During the dark age, through neglect and sometimes even abuse, women giving birth were routinely traumatized both mentally and physically. To make matters worse, professional nurses who were supposed to protect them were effectively neutralized as competent guardians of laboring women through on-going verbal and emotional abuse by medical staff and others—abuse that sometimes escalated into violence.