Mary Ellis, Student Nurse

By Hope Newell, ©1958 

Mary Ellis Stebbins, the delightful heroine of A Cap for Mary Ellis, who left her home in New York’s Harlem to attend a newly integrated nursing school upstate, is sure her second year of study will bring many problems. It does, but they have little to do with racial conflict—for the most part, they concern her additional responsibilities as a second-year student. And then there is the entirely welcome complication of furthering her friendship with a nice young intern!

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I think I’ve finally persuaded her that there are more important things in life than comfort.” 

“If you youngsters talked less about managing patients and more about understanding them you’d make a lot more headway.”

“How annoying patients can be when they try to make things easy for nurses.”

“Lots of girls take up nursing with the idea of being angels of mercy to the sick and suffering and all but idolized by their grateful patients. Then they meet up with a few Miss Swopes and find out that even angels are not always appreciated. Before they know it they’ve forgotten their high ideals and begin to think of nursing as just a way to make a living.”

“It wasn’t necessary to answer insulting people.”

REVIEW:
Mary Ellis Stebbins is returning to Woodycrest Memorial Hospital for her second year of nursing; she was one of two Black students admitted the year prior when the school integrated, and a third Black woman is starting this fall as a new student. The incoming class is introduced to the second years, and each is given a “little sister” to mentor, so immediately we have 14 nursing students to keep straight—not helped by the fact that they are all given fairly stupid nicknames. Mary Ellis, for example, is called Tater, because last year she was posing as a patient when another student was practicing washing, and was told that the amount of water she was using wasn’t enough to clean a potato. And so it goes for 13 more young ladies. 

Each incoming student has some handicap to overcome—some are just poor with scraped-together wardrobes, but Claudia Orcott had a “coasting accident”—not really sure what that is, sledding, possibly—and disfigured her nose; even though grumpy plastic surgeon Dr. Meyers refuses to do plastic surgery “merely for cosmetic reasons,” Mary Ellis decides she’s going to ask him to fix Claudia’s horrific appearance, and then we don’t hear from Miss Orcott or about this again until the end of the book.

Before long intrigue blooms when in one afternoon a gold rosary and two other students’ money go missing. What a scandal! “As long as every one of our class is in on the secret, I reckon we won’t have any trouble keeping it from the rest of the school,” Mary Ellis suggests with apparently genuine sincerity. Well, the mystery is solved by one of the students—not Mary Ellis—who would give Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple a run for her money. Now the book is half over and we only have 75 more pages to go.

As a second-year nursing student, Mary Ellis is the only person staffing an entire ward on the overnight shift. Astonishingly, the only “horrible experience” she has is when an elderly patient with a fatal disease dies and she does not realize this when she checks on him in the morning before going off duty. But time goes on, “gradually dulling her misery” over this terrible “mistake,” and soon we’re three-quarters through the book, when four new interns come to the hospital, and one of them, Dr. Harris, is Black! Which means that “each of the three colored girls was hoping that Dr. Harris would seek her out and ask her for a date.” That was how it was in the day, unbelievable as it is now.

Now we have a whirlwind of crises for Mary Ellis to right. It turns out the plastic surgeon Dr. Meyers and his wife are hoping to adopt a child but are considered too old. You will not be shocked to hear that Mary Ellis discovers a soon-to-be orphaned boy in the hospital; his mother has “an incurable disease” and “had not long to live.” She manages to rescue the boy, Sammy, when he nearly strangles on the restraining straps tying him to his crib (!!), and introduces Sammy to Dr. Meyers—a week later everything is all settled, and Mary Ellis then asks Dr. Meyers to have a look at Claudia’s nose, which apparently no one has bothered to do until now, though several discussions among the staff have occurred during the school year. All that remains is for Mary Ellis to wangle a date with Dr. Harris and pass her exams and we can close the book.

One of this book’s flaws is that it gets too heavily into details. For example, there’s a pages-long discussion of possible ways Claudia might first glimpse her new nose, and more pages discussing the machinations behind the organization of the Capping Ceremony; there are also more than 60 named characters to try (and fail) to keep track of (not to mention their nicknames). Furthermore, for a nursing student, we don’t see much of Mary Ellis outside the dormitory. She is constantly dwelling on the fact that her teachers tell her she is “not very hot in making decisions and that kind of thing.” But her daily life as a nursing student is almost completely ignored and we rarely ever see her at work, when she is either burning the toast or saving a toddler from strangulation. The fact that Mary Ellis is one of the first Black women accepted to her school and is likely subjected to racism is only rarely or tangentially discussed, and it seems that the author of this book was actually white. Author Rubie Saunders is widely (and as far as I can discover, appropriately) credited as being the first Black author of romance novels featuring a Black heroine, but here we have a curious example of a white author writing a Black heroine. I am curious to know how and why this book came about, but I’m guessing this mystery will never be answered; if only we could get Mary Ellis’ classmate on the case.

The Prodigal Nurse

By Teresa Hyde Phillips, ©1936 

Celia Landis looked across the dingy table at Tony Starr, whose fine surgeon’s hands were toying nervously with a coffee cup. “No, Tony,” she said slowly, “I’m not ready to be married yet. I … I haven’t really lived.” And Tony, who knew she was the best nurse St. Martha’s had ever had, smiled into her impetuous young eyes, and was silent, thinking, “You’ll be back soon enough!” So Celia tried life—a life not bounded by nurse’s rules or constant sacrifice, and with the help of suave Carlie Daklin she became the best photographer’s model in New York. But what of happiness? Celia had to choose between Carlie—her kind “angel” in this new and giddy world and Tony—the symbol of a life she had vowed to abandon. Which would it be?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“The only thing wrong with you is astigmatism.” 

“I have had dozens of nurses it seems to me in these last weeks and I had begun to believe that your profession begets none but worthy women who look like nothing but disasters on land and sea.”

“Women were such egotists, they thought that what they said and did and what happened to them mattered so much.”

“I’m a Harvard man. I wouldn’t get myself seriously shot outside a lady’s boudoir.”

“One’s mind said, ‘One must not think, nor remember, nor hope.’ Champagne said, ‘Leave that all to me.’”

“Character is a better bet than glamour any day.”

“Women have some silly romantic idea about surgeons. Completely uncalled for. They have a job, like the rest of us.”

“Men! They let you down. For chivalry, for kindness, you went to women.”

REVIEW:
Celia Landis is “twenty-one, beautiful and free!” She’s just graduated from nursing school, and Dr. Anthony Starr, right there on the first page, is “offering her the prisonhouse of marriage, proffering the ball and chain.” Good girl, she turns him down flat. “I don’t believe in marriage,” she says. “I don’t want to be tied down. I want to see things, to do things, to find out for myself. I want to be on my own.” The author, interestingly, doesn’t seem to be on the side of her heroine, as Dr. Starr, who “knew that only in bonds is there freedom,” is smiling condescendingly at Celia. 

It seems that Celia thinks she has made a mistake by becoming a nurse. She was forced into it when both her parents died her freshman year in college and there was no money to pay for her education. Now she has no other option but to work  to support herself, though she is not interested in dedicating her life, “as that of his wife must be, to illness” and is hoping to find another career option. “I’m not tough,” she tells him. “I want the beauty and the fun of life.” Of course, she is nonetheless “an exceptionally good nurse,” as VNRN heroines, reluctant though they may be, usually are.

She loses her first two cases because men in the house insist on forcing themselves on her, and the head of the nursing registry of course blames Celia for this. “If there was anything to be deplored in a nurse, it was beauty. Beauty. Detestable quality, leading only to trouble,” the woman thinks. In the depths of despair that she will never get another nursing job, Celia runs into Tony and his boss, Dr. Alderdice, and the pair take her to lunch. Afterward, as Celia tries to tell Tony about her fears, he dutifully proposes again, though Celia thinks he does not mean it and decides she’s not sure who he really is. “She felt that she no longer had any hold on him. None whatsoever.”

Then Carleton Daklin, the husband of one of her patients who had fired her, calls her up and offers her a modeling job. He is the head of an advertising agency and is looking for a nurse to pose in a series of ten ads for the National Hygiene Council, and the pay is $1,000—an enormous sum in the wake of the Great Depression, when a furnished two-bedroom apartment on East 43rd Street costs $120 a month. She takes the job, and when Tony calls her to say he’s taking a trip to the West Indies to do germ research, she tells him of her triumph. He is happy for her, but less so when he hangs up the phone, though he berates himself for his idiocy. “Had he for a minute thought she would say to him: ‘Tony, my darling, nothing that happens to me is of the slightest interest, there’s only you and your life.’” Now he is the one thinking he has lost Celia, but “he knew Celia, he thought, better than she knew herself.”

Then United Models calls, and soon the phone is ringing off the hook. Eventually Tony comes home and phones her, and he’s dismayed with her new life. “What had this girl thrown over? A real job, the greatest thing in the world—medicine,” he thinks, again frustrated that she did not ask him how his trip had gone. She goes out to dinner with Tony and enjoys his companionship, believes “there was no one like him, no one who could touch him in any way.” But he again sneers at her new profession with “amused malice” and tells her she should not have given up nursing so soon. “As a nurse, Celia Landis was a bust on her first two tries and only because she let herself think of herself as a bust,” he says. She is torn between her desire to live her own life and her attraction for him, but chooses the former, though she’s not certain for how long: “When she came to him she must come with everything—heart and mind and with every intent.”

When Tony walks her home, Carleton Daklin is waiting for her in her apartment—the first time Celia has seen him since he got her the modeling job—but Tony does not believe it and stomps out, and when Celia calls him to explain, he is cold. So she starts going places with Carleton, becoming the It Girl of Manhattan. “The emptiness Tony left was teaching her things. It was enlightening.” But one late-night party goes awry and a man is stabbed. Celia is the only one who can keep a cool head, not surprisingly, but the scandal lands her in the tabloids with a not-so-gentle assist from a couple other women in Celia’s circle who do not have her heart of gold—just as the sordid affair has made her realize she wants out of the glittering birdcage, the same day an offer to become chief nurse of the OR at the hospital where she trained arrives, which is withdrawn the next day. Tony runs to her house when he hears the news, but Celia, wounded to the core, can only snarl, “To tell me exactly what to do—is that your idea of friendship?” It’s more than a little true, but Tony says good bye and leaves, Celia thinks for good.

There are the usual crises before Celia is brought back to her man and nursing career, and if the ending wasn’t quite the complete perfection I wanted it to be, this is still a really lovely book. The writing in this book is sparkling: “Behold Miss Celia Landis, R.N., diploma summa cum laude, drilling through the traffic of Manhattan in a taxi which looked like any other taxi but which, if the world had eyes, was a jumping-off place from which one flung oneself into the fun of accomplishment.” It’s a thoughtful book full of philosophy about life and what is important, but not overly intellectual. It’s not hard to feel what the characters are going through, and how Celia has grown over the course of the book. If for most of this book she is not working as a nurse, she is still at heart a nurse throughout. My only real beef is that the ending does not clearly give Celia the strength she has earned from her experiences, and it’s not quite certain how she is going to live up to her new character. But that aside, this is a thoroughly delicious book, and if you can track down a copy for yourself, the effort will be worth it.