In my native Australia (I know Laura's seen me mention this before) there was a show on from 1981 until 1994 called A Country Practice. It revolved around a medical practice and a bush nursing hospital and featured a lot about life on the land and teenage issues, such as eating disorders, teenage pregnancies, AIDS, homosexuality and the narrow-minded attitudes of some country folk, even though the scriptwriters were left-leaning. In one episode, an elderly white man lived on the outskirts of town, and a young female doctor was there and the former accused her of sticky-beaking. It was revealed in the next episode that the man was quite embittered with the medical profession because his wife was Aboriginal and she was sick in childbirth and he went to town to get the doctor and the doctor wouldn't help because he was a racist. His wife died in childbirth and so did the baby. That was not an uncommon occurrence.

My great-grandfather's first wife died in childbirth and if I'd have been him and I'd had the choice back then of getting a doctor or getting the local Aboriginal women, as I would have been the type of person who'd have said, "Okay, you can drink from the waterhole on my property and you can hunt for your food around," I'd have gone and gotten the local Aboriginal women because they would have dug a pit and lined it with some bark and had my wife squat over the pit and given birth, whereas the doctor would have arrived with a blood spattered apron and blood stained hands (a sign of competence back then, pre Joseph Lister). And, if there'd been a Chinese doctor in one direction and a European doctor in the other, and I'd have been his neighbor, and he'd gone into town to get the European doctor, I'd have shaken my head and thought, "What?" because the Chinese doctor would have been cleaner.

I remember a doctor making a smart Alec remark to my mother saying that he'd seen a Chinese lady the day before whose face had swollen as a reaction to something and laughing about it, and I thought, "What a racist so-and-so!"