Middenrammers is a brave and provocative novel about one doctor’s battle for social justice in a small-town hospital. Set in the UK in the 1970s, the story follows young Dr. Brian Davis’ efforts to adjust to his new job in a Yorkshire fishing town. The town’s only hospital permits no contraceptive advice, or abortions. Dr. Davis and Woodie — the midwife he falls in love with — regularly come face to face with the terrible repercussions of these policies. Because they refuse to accept the attitude of the hospital administrators — who believe that the right thing to do is to restrict choice and deny reproductive options — the course of their lives is changed as much as those of the patients.

Dr. John Bart earned his medical degree from the Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine in the UK in 1969, and has lived and worked as a family physician in Toronto since 1973. He also has degree in comparative vertebrate anatomy. He is an original member of the Toronto HIV Primary Care Physicians Group, and the Canadian Association of Physicians for the Environment (CAPE). He is married, with five children and seven grandchildren. Middenrammers is his first book.

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“This straightforward and engaging book takes a clean, sharp scalpel to dissect a time that has sad parallels with our own. The love story that runs like a gleaming thread through this dark account is one of the most intelligent and satisfying I can remember.”

John Bart

"This admirably direct and plain-spoken novel, free of metaphor, graphically describes the pain and blood and sorrow and joy of both pregnancy and the delivery room, pitting the ideals of a young doctor against the sanctimony of his superiors. A love story as well, Middenrammers awaits the arrival of the BBC, who surely should love it for a new series set in East Yorkshire, gulls wheeling over the fish plant, lovers in the alleys, cries in the night."

Nicholas Ruddock