The first day of life is the most dangerous, and Bob Woods’ final book, co-authored with Chris Galley and published posthumously, explores the dangers for both mother and child with magnificent clarity and detail. The core of the book is a sustained consideration of case notes from a number of mid-wives and man-midwives from the seventeenth to early nineteenth centuries, that provides unprecedented insights into the practical aspects of delivery and obstetric practices that have been neglected in most academic research on midwifery. The detailed descriptions of difficult births leave the reader in no doubt of the high price exacted by the evolutionary trade-off between bipedalism and cranial capacity, and of the critical importance of skilled birth attendants in these cases. Nonetheless, in the English population and in London the risks of death for mothers, newborns and foetuses declined markedly over the course of the eighteenth century, and a central theme of the book is an ambitious attempt to relate obstetric practice as revealed by medical case notes to population-scale trends in maternal and perinatal mortality.