Soul Nurse

By Rose Dana
(pseud. William Daniel Ross), ©1970 

Sally Hughes, R.N., had a nurse’s dream come true at Canton General. Her boss was the brilliant chief surgeon, Dr. Stan Thorne. She was respected for her dedication, talent and poise. And two men loved her—the bitter but handsome Dr. Jim Dawson and Stan himself. But Stan was white. Could Sally, a black girl, even hope to surmount the difficulties their love presented in the small New England town? Perhaps she would find a way … then tragedy struck. Canton’s mayor is mysteriously stabbed, a black person is unjustly accused and Sally faces a desperate choice—one that involves not only her man but the meaning of her life. 

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“It’s fortunate the doctor also happens to be adept with a knife.” 

“You’re not the least female in that respect. Your punctuality constantly amazes me.”

“It was those who clung most precariously to a rung of the status ladder who refused to make a break with the pat order of things.”

“You need a steady hand for that brain tumor today.”

“Isn’t that the goal of most of the people these days? They want drugs to make everything seem rosy from the cradle to the grave. It’s no longer fashionable to try and change things. You just take drugs so you won’t notice them.”

“Like a scalpel frankness should be used only by skilled hands, otherwise it can work great havoc.”

“Interns devour little girls like you. You be careful with them.”

“Don’t be so bitter. You’re much too pretty.”

“Loud talk brings on more loud talk.”

REVIEW:
A nurse romance novel, which necessarily delves into the life of a woman, is always a little problematic when written by a man. A nurse novel about a Black nurse is especially unfortunate when it’s written by a white man, and I’ll admit I am even more wary when the author in question is one I’ve never liked, here William Daniel Ross writing under one of his many pseudonyms, who has earned only a C+ average across 16 reviews. And perhaps not surprisingly, this book is somewhat problematic—yet not nearly as bad as I had feared it would be, so that’s a win. 

Sally Hughes is a Black scrub nurse working at Canton General Hospital in New Hampshire’s “largest seacoast city,” which at the time when this book was written was Portsmouth. (I have to state that I once lived in Portsmouth, so I have some expertise regarding this setting.) Sally works alongside Dr. Stan Thorpe, who lost his wife to breast cancer three years ago, leaving him with a now-15-year-old daughter Karen, with whom Sally is especially close and sees regularly. Stan also has fond feelings for Sally, and repeatedly pleads with her to marry him, but though she “perhaps even loved” Stan, she is constantly talking herself out of a relationship with him entirely on racial grounds. “What would be the community’s reaction? Would it harm his career?” she worries and considers, “There were things she and Dr. Stan Thorpe would never be able to share, points of view, emotional feelings about remembered days long past, pride of race and color.” She seldom gives any thought about whether being with Stan and Karen makes her happy—which obviously it does, as she spends an enormous amount of time with them. “It was useless to pretend that being with Stan Thorpe and Karne didn’t mean anything to her. Probably she gained a great deal more from it than they did. For just a short time she was allowed to feel part of a family unit.”

There’s another man in her orbit, Dr. Jim Dawson. “It was only natural that they should be attracted to each other,” we are told, but it isn’t until 18 pages later that we learn that Jim is Black, which I guess is supposed to be the reason why their attraction is “natural”—in the same way it’s natural for every white woman to be attracted to every white man? Jim is an exceptionally talented doctor who has built up a good practice in this predominantly white community, a fact that is repeated often with a tinge of surprise. Jim is described as the stereotypical angry Black man barely under control: “Sally was fearful for him. She knew better than most of the others that beneath his calm professional exterior and mocking, sometimes bitter humor there was an explosive temper. Although now it was carefully controlled, the day might come when some insignificant incident might be enough to touch it off.”

Well, you can be sure something happens, but it’s not insignificant. First the mayor is stabbed in his own driveway—saved in the OR by Dr. Stan Thorpe and his right-hand gal Sally—but the mayor has a slimy colleague, Sam Grayson, who is intent on promoting the idea that the perpetrator was a Black man from Boston—he even uses the N-word—though the mayor declares he never saw his assailant, and there’s not even any evidence outside of Sam’s say-so that any Boston Blacks were in town that night.

Then it is announced that a new “cut off” to Interstate 95 is planned—and it will be passing directly through Blair Settlement, a neighborhood of 150 families. (The actual number of Black people living in Portsmouth in 1970 was about 116, or about 0.4% of the total population, so the book’s number is wildly unrealistic, as is the idea that Route 95 would need an additional on-ramp in this fairly rural community.) But the impending destruction of the neighborhood sends Jim into a fury. Sally tries to assuage Jim repeatedly that “it may not be as bad as it seems,” because “she knew it was going to take a great deal of patience and tact to save this man she was so fond of from taking a big leap into trouble and destroying his career.”

Jim is having none of it, and repeatedly insults Sally, telling her, “I can do without your well-integrated caution,” and calling her a “turncoat,” a “would-be Delilah” who has “lost her identity.” He’s bringing in a big-time organizer from a Black Power group to speak at a meeting he’s calling to protest the plans, and Sally is afraid the move will end in violence, and that general opposition to the project—currently pretty high, according to hospital gossip—will evaporate. Soon Jim is getting hate calls in his office, and he’s decided to leave the area for a big city. “People here only want me around when they’re too sick to think of anything but their own white skin. Well, I won’t be at their beck and call. I’m leaving,” he announces, forgetting that all doctors are “called” by their patients when they’re ill. He wants Sally to come with him, but she’s not sure: “I’d be afraid of being tainted by your twisted thinking, by your stupid hates. Emotional illness is sometimes like physical sickness—it can be catching,” she tells him.

Not only is Jim just endlessly mean to Sally, he never overtly proposes to her, never speaks of any feeling for her other than disgust at her position, only asking her to “go with me” when he leaves town. Stan, on the other hand, speaks often and freely of his love for Sally. “You’ve made life bearable for me again,” he tells her. “I’d still be lost without you. Any time I lose you I’ll suffer. I’m in love with you. We’re ideally suited. I’ll keep on asking you to marry me until you say yes.” When she tells him, “It would be a nightmare. I’m positive it would,” he answers, “If you’re trying to say we are not suited because of race or color, that’s sheer nonsense. I’m in love with you.”

The big town meeting comes to pass, but Sally does not attend, choosing instead to spend the evening at Stan and Karen’s house. The meeting turns out to be a complete bust when the organizer—himself a racist; he tells Sally, “I’m not sure I know any decent white people”—“started ranting about everything under the sun,” Jim tells Sally. “He rambled and raged so that he left the Blair Settlement crowd bewildered.” In the end Jim had stepped up and explained that he was hoping to send a petition to the governor, but by that time the fiery rhetoric had lost some of the crowd. Ultimately the neighborhood is saved—but only for the most banal of reasons, budget. “They’ve made a lot of other cuts in their highway budget but that’s the main one,” we are told. Sally continues to insist that bigotry “doesn’t represent the feelings of most Canton people,” but Jim can’t believe that and is determined to leave town. He also has lost interest in Sally, it seems: “Jim Dawson had stopped proposing to her some time ago. He’d even suggested she marry Stan.”

There’s a lot to think about with this book. Is Sally’s preferred method of just talking to people the best way to save the neighborhood? She explains to a friendly fellow nurse, a white woman who has pointed out that the Black families would have been financially compensated for their loss, that it’s hard for Black people to buy homes because they might not be welcome or may not be able to afford a different home, and the nurse “looked embarrassed. ‘I see now it’s not a simple problem of selling homes and buying other ones. I didn’t really understand what it was all about,’” she says, showing that white people in town are reasonable, if ignorant of the realities of Black lives.

On the other hand, the other extreme of the Black organizer being too radical for a small-town New Hampshire crowd is too pat and seems like a cop out—one has to ask if it was the author’s racially motivated fear that inspired this plot turn. Dodging a real discussion of Jim and Sally’s preferred tactics (though Sally’s is tacitly endorsed as she wins over her work colleagues and roommates with conversation) is lazy, and the medium path of Martin Luther King’s peaceful marches is never entertained, nor is the obvious outreach to the general public through the press or general meetings or a door-to-door campaign. I did appreciate that in her daily life Sally repeatedly and calmly faces down racism with smart retorts, but in the end, her strength isn’t enough to keep me from feeling that this white male Canadian author demonstrates a clear bias writing about a female Black American and her struggles for racial equality. I saw this when the characters’ attempts at strong advocacy were made such a complete failure, and when the people who actually saved the neighborhood were not its residents but faceless bureaucrats without feeling for the problem or the potentially dehoused locals. Even Sally’s totally bewildering final decision about her love life is suspect, and I have zero hope that she will ultimately be happy by choosing the then-culturally accepted path instead of following her heart and going with the right (white) man. I’m going to suggest, though, that it doesn’t mean this book isn’t worth reading. Overall the writing and characters (aside from reactionary Jim) are good, and it’s always important to be able to spot the flaws in writing and thinking, especially when it comes to prejudice. As bigotry becomes more subtle (granted less so recently), it takes more skill to see it, and this book offers opportunity to hone your skills. 

Crusading Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. Adele Maritano), ©1968 

Susan Leighton was a pretty young nurse and as innocent as they come. She had no idea what was going on at Parsons Community Hospital, even though the newspapers hinted at mismanagement and malpractice. It was handsome Dr Corbett who opened her eyes—who set her off on a lonely crusade against some powerful enemies, and a shattering struggle against the man she loved.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Any time that beautiful hunk of man wants to breathe down my neck, he’ll get a warm welcome.” 

“Is that passion or asthma?”

“Nobody’s ever going to like you less for saying you’re sorry.”

“How can a man that handsome be that irritating?”

REVIEW:
Susan Leighton is admittedly not the strongest nurse on my bookshelf. She took her training at a “small and not highly accredited” school that had “left innumerable blanks in her education,” and after arriving in Parsons, IL, to work at the community hospital there, she remains insecure about her ability. She’s been reading her textbooks at night because, she tells hospital board President Eugene Kalb, “I’m so terribly conscious of the responsibility a nurse takes on. I actually get cold chills, sometimes, realizing that a child’s life may depend on my doing the right thing. I want to be sure I haven’t forgotten anything I learned in pediatrics.” Her temerity leads her to be overmuch “in awe of the hospital and the people who ran it,” overly impressed that “everyone’s so—so dedicated.” When Eugene complains that reporter Mike Stetson is rooting around the hospital for any evidence that the facility’s practices are subpar, on the heels of stories the newspaper has published about graft in the city government, the administrator candidly admits that there is “a little hanky-panky going on” at City Hall, but there’s none at the hospital! Susan just nods and smiles.

On the job, her colleague, Tenny Williams, a longtime and highly experienced nurse, voices concerns about safety practices—there’s only one nurse covering the night shift on the newborn nursery, which can hold up to 25 babies. “Susan frowned, wishing Tenny would stop involving her in matters that weren’t the concern of ordinary employees. She felt a queasy sense of disloyalty, questioning the decisions of her superiors.” Because it’s not her concern if she is responsible so many patients that they are in danger.

Then Dr. Dale Corbett turns up on the premises. He wanders around asking the staff a lot of questions about how the hospital is run, and it’s revealed that he’s from Boston and is working on a paper evaluating hospital safety. He eventually wanders into the nursery and starts asking Susan questions about her work. “It’s less taxing and it’s sort of fun,” she says, explaining why she likes working in the nursery. Possibly amused by how adorable this answer is, he then asks her if she is aware that two-thirds of infant mortality occurs in the first week of life and what she knows about erythroblastosis fetalis (aka Rh factor incompatibility) which one infant on the nursery suffers from, and she is forced to confess her ignorance. Despite her initial claims that she worries about being a conscientious and knowledgeable nurse, now she is “resentful of what seemed to be a petty inquisition” rather than horrified at her ignorance and dashing back to her textbooks.  But she can’t help panting when he’s around, soon deciding after having lunch with him in the cafeteria that she is falling in love with him.

It’s not going to be an easy relationship, though, as she asks Dale why he isn’t “really serving humanity” by opening a medical practice instead of scrutinizing hospital policy. “Because maybe I’ll be forced to take patients to a hospital that kills instead of cures,” he answers—and she responds by again relentlessly and naively defending the hospital. After a couple of dates they finally kiss, and he proposes on the spot. Susan wisely answers that they should get to know each other better, but after he bizarrely stiffens up and leaves, Susan reverses course and decides, “They had disagreed on an important issue, they had known each other only a short time, they were virtually strangers. None of that mattered! Love was enough.” Of course, the question of whether it can really be love after just two dates is not asked.

The next day at work, everything should be bliss, but that darned Dr. Corbett shows up in the pediatrics ward where one child has a postop Staph infection after a tonsillectomy, and he asks why no one is taking infection precautions such as gowning and gloving and handwashing before and after seeing the patient. “Smugly, identifying herself firmly with the medical staff,” Susan declares, “Why, the laundry bill, if we put on and discarded a gown every time we go into this room, would be staggering.” Then, when Dr. Corbett points out a chain of medical errors and prevents Susan from delivering a major overdose to a patient, she snaps, “You’ve managed to unnerve everybody who works here. We’re all so nervous, we’re making mistakes because of you! All I know is that we were getting along very well without your constant sniping. We were doing a good job.” Her ignorance is colossally staggering, but more so is her arrogant conviction that she, a self-admittedly poorly trained nurse in her first weeks on the job, knows more than a doctor about management of a serious infection. I really can’t imagine why her alarming blindness does not turn Dr. Corbett off completely, as it seems to indicate a serious character flaw.

On her way out of the hospital, Susan runs into Eugene Kalb in the hallway. He starts to gripe about Dr. Corbett, and she, shaken by what might have been a fatal error, tells him there might be room for improvement in an organization as large as this one. He snaps, “You have to align yourself either with people who have worked hard to make this hospital a reality or with those whose object seems to be to tear it down.” Suddenly she sees “in Eugene’s ethic there were no patients whose lives depended on your skill and knowledge and compassion. There were only customers, from whom a specified sum was to be extracted.” Then, meeting with the hospital head nurse to confess her error, she catches the woman in a weak moment and she confirms of all Dr. Corbett’s insinuations—that the hospital is “a disgrace to the profession and a threat to this community,” that a number of patients have died or been injured due to shoddy practices.

Now Susan is all afire to save the hospital and decides to get all the hospital employees to start making suggestions about how their practices can be improved—and gets nothing but cold stares from her coworkers when she suggests it. And that’s the end of that—because the pediatrics ward’s lack of precautions with a highly infectious patient have resulted in a hospital-wide outbreak of Staph infections, and finally everyone is on board with improving their outcomes—after the epidemic, which results in seven deaths, has been tamed, and Dr. Corbett and the reporter have been vindicated in their mission to improve the hospital. All that remains is to find out if Susan will triumph in her mission of winning back Dr. Corbett.

This book is well written and amusing, as books by the erratic and prolific (this is the 33rd book of hers I have reviewed) author Adele Maritano are, and even includes a sensitive portrait of an experienced and intelligent Black nurse (Tenny Williams), one of the best Black characters I’ve met in a VNRN, alongside Marilyn Morgan. But our heroine’s head-snapping flips in attitude, from insecure new nurse to arrogant hospital defender to “crusading” (albeit only for a day) nurse, are problematic to say the least. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone who knows her at all would want to continue to do so, because her rigidity of thinking and her nastiness to anyone who challenges it are not pleasant character traits. But when Adele Maritano is on her game, she is second to none, and if her heroine brings down the grade on this book, her writing here is top form, making time with it well spent.