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This series was a collaboration with my wife Jutta Mason.  First broadcast early in 1985, nearly thirty years ago, it was based on her work in archives across the country on the history of childbirth and childrearing in Canada, looking first at what life was like before the establishment of the modern medical system, and then at how this system established its hegemony in the first half of the 20th century.   A couple of years later Jutta would draw on this work to write the historical section of the Report on the Implementation of Midwifery in Ontario (1987) which led to the legalization of midwifery in this province.   I'm rebroadcasting it here now so it will be available to young friends in their childbearing years who are wondering how things got the way they are...

This series was broadcast in 2,000 twelve years after my first interviews with Ivan Illich were presented on Ideas.  We had become friends in the meanwhile, and I had spent as much time with him as his peripatetic style and my more settled life in Toronto allowed.   During that time we again and again discussed a theme I had barely been aware of when I recorded the first series: Illich's idea that the Western civilization that grew out of Latin Christendom could only be fully grasped when understood as the corruption, or perversion of the New Testament.  When itbecame clear that he would never be able, in the the time remaining to him, to write a book on this theme, I offered to try and elicit his ideas in a series of interviews.  These took place over a period of several weeks in 1996 and 1998 and were then broadcast on Ideas.  Four years later, and two years after Illich's death in 2002, a complete transcription of these interviews was published, with a preface by Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor, under the title The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich.   Here are the radio programmes...