Call the Midwife

Season 5

1. When Sister Monica Joan is in the barn and says "Dost thou think because thou art a rat there shall be no more cakes and ale?" she is deliberately misquoting Sir Toby Belch in Shakespeare's Twelfth Night ( replacing 'virtuous' with 'rat').
2. It is revealed in files that Sister Monica Joan was born Antonia Keville and became a Postulant in 1908.
3. Prior to the development of the measles vaccine in the 1960s, nearly twice as many children died from measles as from polio.

1. Susan's limb deformities were caused by the drug thalidomide, prescribed for morning sickness and other ailments in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Dr. Turner prescribed it to another mother in Call the Midwife: Episode #4.8 (2015) and would later be racked by guilt when the connection between the deformed babies and the drug was exposed.

1. Although the type of leukemia Johnny Beckett had was not specified, acute myeloid leukemia (AML) is the most common type found in adults, especially among males. High benzene exposure increases the risk for AML, and Johnny's lifetime of working on the docks could have contributed.

1. This episode features two songs written by Carole King and Gerry Goffin: "Will You Love Me Tomorrow", performed by The Shirelles, and "Take Good Care of My Baby", performed by Bobby Vee. Both songs were released in the United Kingdom in 1961, while King released her own version in 1971.

1. Dr. Turner's initial stance that cigarettes did not necessarily cause lung cancer is an accurate portrayal of doctors in this era. Lung cancer was once an extremely rare disease, but the mass production and marketing of cigarettes caused a global epidemic of the disease in the 20th century. Scientific evidence that cigarettes were the cause of the epidemic existed as early as the 1940s, but cigarette manufacturers disputed this and aggressively issued denialist propaganda to both the public and medical professionals. By 1960, two-thirds of all doctors in the United States did not believe smoking cigarettes had been proven to cause cancer. Until the 1960s, the UK Ministry of Health declined to consider public health education campaigns warning of the dangers of smoking, as some of its civil servants did not believe it caused cancer and also because they feared any campaign would create a cancer "phobia" that would overwhelm the new National Health Services.

1. The prison tattoo with the hammer and sickle, which the expert explains references what the tattoo wearer thinks of his sentence, has the letters "BOG" written in Cyrillic. "BOG" has two meanings as it is both an acronym for "Byl Osuzhden Gosudarstvom" ("condemned by the state") and is also the Russian word for "God."

1. Chummy and Jenny were originally intended to return for this episode, however Miranda Hart was faced with scheduling issues while Jessica Raine declined.