Nurse Lucie

By Georgia Craig (pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1964
Also published as Nurse at Guale Farms

Nurse Lucie Hatcher walked headlong into another world when she arrived at the small Georgia clinic at Guale Farms, eager to work with the skilled Dr. Wesley Warren. Lucie didn’t plan to get involved with the handsome young doctor, nor with the rich owner of the experimental farms, Perry Latham. But she did … with both. Then suddenly, women from Wesley’s and Perry’s lives appeared and disrupted Lucie’s paradise. Could she give Wesley up to the mysterious woman from his past? Could she fight the powerful and jealous Latham family for Perry’s love? Lucie’s paradise soon turned into a nightmare …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re much too pretty to be working at a grim job like this.” 

“A job? My dear girl! That’s a nasty word. Go immediately and wash your mouth out with soap and water.”

“The one end and aim of every woman is marriage and a home of her own.”

“She’s really a looker, isn’t she, now that we’ve got her dried out and all?”

REVIEW:
Lucie Hatcher has left Atlanta to come work in a small rural town, and a good number of the local folks are bewildered as to why she—or he—is willing to “bury herself in a place like Lathamtown. It’s just about the most lonesome place anybody ever heard tell of.” But it’s well paying, and she’s always wanted to experience life in the country, as she’s been a city gal her whole life, and now that she’s arrived in her “silly scrap of a yellow pillbox hat” she’s here to stay, dammit! 

She’s offered a ride from the bus station to the clinic by the pathologically angry schoolteacher Jane Berner, who warns Lucie that she’s to keep her mitts off Gareth Latham, who has just returned home after getting kicked out of college yet again. He’s the stepbrother of Perry Latham, who runs a large experimental farm in nearby Lathamtown and “doesn’t want anything that would bring tourists this way. He doesn’t want Graysville to install drive-in movie theatres, or taverns, or beer-and-wine package stores, or pin-ball machines; anything that might lure the young of Lathamtown astray. He’s not going to allow such devices within easy reach of his people.” Lucie lets this description of an oppressive local dictator pass with little comment or musing about how one person could possibly prevent the development of a whole town, and when she actually meets the tall, very good-looking man with a lean, sun-bronzed face, any further reference to this alarming aspect of Perry’s character drops away and is never mentioned again. As long as he’s cute, who cares if he’s fascist? It’s not long, of course, before he’s kissing her goodnight.

Perry has a stepmother, Belle, and she and Gareth “will never let Perry marry any woman.” When Lucie rightly expresses her incredulity that a grown man, especially a fascist, will be led around by his stepmother, she is told that Belle will “go after the girl. Once Belle gets the idea that Perry is seriously interested in any girl, she’ll sharpen up her knives until they’ll make every scalpel in the clinic seem dull.” Lucie also starts to question, when Jane puts the idea in her head, why “a doctor as young as Dr. Warren is and as skilled would be working in a small rural clinic instead of setting up a fine city practice somewhere or specializing in doing research.” But Dr. Warren is described as a local authority to whom other area doctors regularly consult, so his practice does not seem unsatisfying, if one is interested in primary care for an underserved community—and it’s curious that such a practice, today considered noble, would be scorned.

But Dr. Warren’s practice takes a considerable hit when Leonore Arnold, his fiancée, shows up in a rainstorm. It turns out the woman has gone insane after seeing her mother murdered by home invaders and has been committed to an institution—but has improved enough from her previously catatonic state to learn where Dr. Warren is, escape and find her way 20 miles to his door. Dr. Warren immediately tries to resign because when the town hears that “there’s a mental case here, the story will be built up that she’s a lunatic and her presence here makes everybody unsafe.” Perry insists that he stay, and that Leonore is sure to get well, even if she must never, ever remember that horrible incident again, because “her love will restore her to complete sanity.” Sure it will! Also, remember that since only the clinic personnel know she’s there, the secret won’t get out, “because nurses aren’t allowed to discuss their patients with outsiders.” Lucie, however, immediately lets drop in a packed waiting room that the doctor in charge of the sanitorium has arrived in the clinic to see a patient, and tells Belle that the patient “is no maniac,” just “a girl who is mildly ill mentally.” (And, it must be pointed out, she repeatedly tells anyone who asks about numerous other patients under her care.) So much for keeping a secret. 

Soon patients stop coming to clinic or calling for Dr. Warren’s services, and everyone, including Lucie, is perplexed as to how word got out, interestingly enough. Unfortunately, Leonore herself is one of those classic Peggy Gaddis characters, a beautiful, “bright-eyed, inquisitive child” who has no personality or brain whatsoever, and flings herself at poor Dr. Warren whenever he’s near, pleading, “Please, please, darling, let me stay here with you! I’ll die if I have to be taken away from you!” Not surprisingly, Dr. Warren at one point admits to Lucie that he no longer loves Leonore, but since the nutty shrinking violet is utterly helpless, he is soon declaring his love to her face and insisting they be married immediately. Another thorny issue raised and then perplexingly dropped completely.

Then Belle pops in to threaten Lucie, as promised, that she must not marry Perry, though she has absolutely no weapon to use against Lucie. Perplexingly, Lucie—who is now in love with Perry—tells Belle that she has no interest in Perry but plans to marry Gareth, which sets Belle back on her heels a bit, but then Lucie reverses course and says, “I wouldn’t marry either of the Latham men, even if they were the last men in the world!” Guess who has just come in the door behind her? The only possible way the pair could be reconciled is if Leonore, whose mental illness has mysteriously rendered her unable to walk, takes off into the swamp in her wheelchair and the rest of the gang is somehow unable to find her, and the overwhelming stress of the situation sends Lucie straight into Perry’s arms. The good news is that Leonore is found in a coma suffering from concussion, and the prognosis of her mental illness improves enormously because “a mild concussion might be helpful in restoring her mind. Perhaps when the concussion heals, she may be able to recall the past.” A couple of x-rays—a highly sensitive test for diagnosing mild brain injury (not)—“had been most satisfactory,” whatever that means, and a week later Leonore wakes from her coma!

The overwhelmingly bad medicine in this book is actually comical if you have any actual medical training or ever watched a few episodes of “Grey’s Anatomy,” and it’s hard to understand why Peggy Gaddis, who wrote what feels like thousands of nurse novels, never bothered to learn anything about the subject. Her penchant for raising difficult problems—like a man whose leg is amputated after he is attacked by an alligator and whose wife leaves him because he’s “a cripple,” though Lucie indignantly protests that the young woman is only in shock and will come to her senses and return (she doesn’t)—and then utterly abandoning them unresolved is also infuriating. But overall this is far from the worst Peggy Gaddis novel I’ve met (that would be Dr. Merry’s Husband, which rated a D-), ranking in the top third of the 34 novels of hers I’ve reviewed to date (God help me, I’ve at least that many more to read before I can rid myself of Peggy Gaddis forever). So if you enjoy the occasional novel that you can chuckle at (not with) without suffering overmuch from aggravating writing and characters, this may be a good bet for you.

We can always count on Valentine
for a hideous cover illustration.

The White Jacket

By Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton), ©1961
Cover illustration by Paul Ann Soik 

Vivien loved her surgical work with all the enthusiasm of her temperamental nature. She had been attracted to Johnny Dysart by his even temper and sound common sense. But the arrival of a new and disturbingly attractive member of the staff changed both their lives—and indeed the lives of many of the doctors and nurses at Queen’s Hospital.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Men! she thought angrily. As soon as a woman begins to think for herself they tell her she’s tired. Tired!” 

“Well, if there’s any giving in to be done, I always think it’s best to let the men have the last word, Doctor. They set a lot of store by it. Women know when they’ve won, and they don’t need to have it in black and white the way men do.”

“Nature heals and the doctor only encourages the patient while she does it.”

“Nothing worthwhile ever is simple.”

REVIEW:
It’s interesting to me that when a VNRN has a female doctor protagonist, there is often at least one more woman MD on the staff—but when the book’s heroine is a nurse, almost never do you meet a female doctor. Anyway, here we have Dr. Vivien Bromwich, who is working in an English hospital. From what I can tell she’s finishing her residency, and covers all specialties, though she spends a lot of time in surgery with Dr. Malcolm, her boss and mentor. 

She’s sort of engaged to Johnny Dysart, though it’s not “official,” whatever that means, because “I want to feel a hundred per cent sure,” she tells Johnny. I guess it really means they’re not engaged. Johnny is a cool customer: “It wasn’t easy to tell with Johnny. His comfortable cheerfulness never varied very much. Big and confident, he made her feel safe.” Safe, of course, is not always a promising feature in VNRN men.

The other woman MD in the book, Dr. Rena Todd, is a 36-year-old surgeon in training who is much discussed by the staff. “Too much ambition,” Johnny snorts. “Rena’s determined to be a Great Surgeon—and if she only knew it, she’d probably be a darn sight happier being the Little Woman to some nice chap.” Vivien, to her only partial credit, disagrees, saying, “She’s not a cabbage like me. I don’t want to be a career woman all my life.” Rena, it turns out, has been married and even had a baby, but it had died and her husband had left her. She’s now unable to have children, so she feels “I’m a failure as a woman,” and that’s part of the reason she works so hard at surgery.

On her own career front, Vivien is proving herself in the OR, and Dr. Malcolm asks her to stay on as his registrar, which I think is the British term for fellow. “Wasting your time, working with me, if you’re not going to go on with it,” he points out. When she says she might get married—the horrible inference being that she’ll quit working—he answers, “Any fool can keep house. But you can do surgery.” I love Dr. Malcolm. Discussing the invitation with Johnny, he refuses to even recognize the compliment, much less consider the offer. “I’m a man, and I have to think about having a career and providing for a family. You don’t,” he tells her. “Why can’t he let me glow, just for once?” she wonders.

In her personal life, while she’s waiting to feel 100 percent certain of Johnny—good luck with that—Vivien meets Edward Featherstone, who is working as an OR porter. “Emboldened by the perfect fit of their interlocking glances,” she starts snatching kisses with him in the autoclave room, and her secret smooching leads her to think she shouldn’t marry Johnny. But then she and Johnny are in a car crash, while he’s driving their friend Dr. Dick Clements’ car, and Johnny is badly hurt, requiring the amputation of several fingers. Now surgery as a specialty is out for him—and we’re panicking, thinking she’ll marry him out of pity, but he breaks up with her from his hospital bed. “Now I begin to live my life the way I want to live it,” she thinks, and the freedom in that sentence truly made my heart lift up.

Unfortunately, the insurance won’t pay for Dick’s car, and the book takes a turn into a mystery story. Vivien borrows $200 from Edward Featherstone and gives it to Dick for his car, but then Edward comes to Vivien in a panic and says he needs the money back immediately, as he’s leaving the area in a highly suspicious hurry! Then avuncular Dr. Malcolm is assaulted and dies of a head wound, and Edward has disappeared, and a patient has been robbed of $200, bills he had fortuitously marked in advance. Edward calls Vivien and tells her to leave the $200 in a telephone booth, and then she learns that he is wanted by the police for murdering Dr. Malcolm. While trying to decide what to do, she confides in Dick Clements, who is increasingly but gently making it clear that he has feelings for Vivien. He sends her to the hospital archives, where she learns that Edward was once signing hospital notes as Edward Featherstone Catlow MD, and that he had lost his privileges at the hospital for stealing drugs.

She and Dick go to the police, who are supposed to surveil the telephone booth after Vivien drops off a fake envelope, but they seem to have gone for doughnuts at the crucial moment because one of the OR nurses is discovered knocked out in the telephone booth and the envelope is gone. Vivien and Dick then head for the coffee shop, but it turns out that the bill Vivien uses to pay the tab is one of the stolen bills! Dick stands by her as she’s questioned by the police—who now think she was the one who knocked out the nurse. “If you’re in it, Viv, I have to be in it too, until it works out,” Dick tells her. “I’m with you.” He’s the kind of person who sees she’s troubled and pulls her aside for a talk. “His quiet strength was unbearably moving to her, the more so for its silence. He put an arm across her shoulder and waited. It was clear that he was prepared to wait all night, if necessary, for her to confide in him.” Well, I was won over!

The mystery is wrapped up, not in the way I’d imagined, but it does turn out that Vivien is innocent after all! This book is a little above the usual, with a mystery that actually is one in some places, solid writing, fine characters, and luscious ball gowns. If we are subjected to the usual sexism that the heroine doesn’t work especially hard to shrug off, she doesn’t completely accept it, either, and lives her life in an honest, forthright way—with a little help from her friends. Olive Norton, here writing as Kate Norway, is quickly becoming a trusted source for an enjoyable, pleasant read, and I am happy to have found her, and this charming book.

Night-Duty Nurse

By Katherine McComb, ©1970

Pretty red-haired Karen Hayden was new at the hospital, but already she had a reputation for efficiency and dedication—since work came first in her life … Then one night a tragic explosion brought scores of emergency patients to the hospital. In the excitement Karen was kissed by Clay Palmer—the handsome, aloof new intern all the nurses were whispering about. After that kiss, sensible as she was, Karen could not wipe the moody Dr. Palmer from her dreams. It was only when Clay Palmer turned all his attention toward a female patient that Karen agreed to date the flirtatious Jack Arlen, an ex-patient of her own, and the son of the most influential man in town. But Jack Arlen was more than an irresponsible playboy, as Karen would soon learn—and Clay Palmer was not a man whose kiss she could easily forget ….

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Right now she was all for planned parenthood, though she knew that on the following day she would change her mind.”

“Close my eyes—with you to look at?”

“Did you, by any chance, have surgery for the removal of the heart, and then run away before they could transplant the new one?”

“I’m going to ask those doctors over there to examine you if they want to discover a sensational phenomenon—a living woman without a heart.”

“ ‘I formed the habit of eating early in life,’ she told him, ‘and I don’t seem able to break the addiction.’ ”

“Did anybody ever tell you how pretty you are when you’re angry? I see now why fishwives always keep their husbands.”

REVIEW:

This book opens with a bang—a literal one, as a ship loaded with crude oil explodes in the harbor outside the hospital. “Enemy attack!” gasps our paranoid heroine, Karen Hayden, as she scrambles to her feet. She reports to Emergency, where she is teamed with the dreamy new resident to help a young man with a severe leg injury. Dr. Clay Palmer is back from a stint in Vietnam that seems to have left him rather crabby, as his first remark to her is, “Stop your daydreaming, Nurse!” To his credit, he apologizes in the cafeteria later, but as Karen starts babbling on about how the patient was petrified he would lose his leg: “It’s like being half a man,” she says understandingly, and Dr. Palmer abruptly stalks off.

Karen quickly recovers from this unfortunate gaffe, or at least with us readers, as she’s soon bantering with her friend Lorna with a sense of humor often relegated to minor characters. With Dr. Palmer, however, it’s another story, and the next time they meet he overhears her saying to a group of tittering nurses, “He has a disposition about as sweet as a crabapple!” Awkward! To her credit, however, she immediately apologizes. He asks about new patient Jack Arlen, spoiled son of wealthy Judge Arlen, who’s cracked up his head and his latest sports car and wants Karen to rub his pains away and otherwise gratify his every whim while he’s in the hospital. Dr. Palmer offers to get young Jack a special so as to free Karen from his wiles, but she tosses her head and declares, “I can take care of myself!” In response to this, Dr. Palmer grabs her and kisses her—and when she kisses him back, he pushes her away and says, “All women are vulnerable.” There is just no way to leave this scene with any fondness at all for Dr. Clay Palmer. And we are reminded of this on two other occasions, when Karen recalls “a young, brash doctor who had kissed her to show his superior strength and laughed at her anger.” But—and you will not be surprised to hear it—her heart is constantly racing or doing double flips or hopping and skipping like a frolicsome rabbit, I’m sorry to report, every time he is near.

Soon the wise “old” charge nurse (she’s 40) is telling Karen that Dr. Palmer is in love with her, but she’s finally relented and started going out with Jack, who respects her fortitude, though the two are really just good friends. Dr. Palmer doesn’t know that, however, and starts dating a rich widow: “My advice to any working girl is: ‘Marry for money.’ That’s what I intend to do—if I ever marry,” he tells her. In the meantime, there’s a young girl with a bone cancer in her leg who needs an amputation, and who runs away from the hospital because her mother insists that she’s better off dead than with just one leg: “What man would want to marry a girl with one leg?” she shrieks. But Karen tries to calm the girl down by telling her that “many amputees live normal, happy lives”—a curious about-face from her earlier position. And after a quiet half-hour chat with Dr. Palmer, young Laurie bravely marches off for her amputation, and “a fund had been started by the townspeople to buy Laurie the best leg possible.”

Eventually Jack proposes, and Karen turns him down because she is not in love with him. He suggests it’s because she thinks he’s an irresponsible kid, she essentially agrees, and he speeds off down the street in a huff. Needless to say, he’s later found with the wreckage of his car wrapped around a tree, with a girl “from the wrong side of the tracks” in the passenger’s seat. Karen soon learns that the girl, Nancy Lord, has recently acquired a new last name—she’s Nancy Alden! It turns out that Nancy and Jack had been in love since they were kids, only Jack was too worried about what his father would say to marry her. Karen’s barb, as it happens, was exactly what he needed to pop the question to the right woman. Who is now in surgery having her skull fracture repaired. You’d think this crisis is going to be the one that skates us into the book’s finale, but no—the darned hospital catches on fire, and it’s up to Karen to rescue at least two-thirds of the patients when some of the more skittish nurses abandon their posts. Dr. Palmer, even more heroic than Karen, is the last one out of the building and suffers some burns, but Karen is there to nurse him back to health.

There’s a little bit of the usual “he doesn’t love he” waffling, unfortunately, at the bitter end when the rich widow Dr. Palmer had toyed with briefly returns to the scene of the crime, which mars the ending slightly. But it’s over as quickly as most of the various scenes in this book, which at times gave me a bit of vertigo with its rapid spinning from topic to topic. But overall this is an enjoyable and amusing book, easily worth the two hours it will take you to blaze through it.

San Francisco Nurse

By Barbara Grabendike, ©1964

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

 

As a nurse, Bret Ames had always dreamed of marrying a doctor, yet when handsome Dr. Nels Larson proposed, she began to have her doubts. Strong, yet gentle, he was the kind of man a girl could lean on. But that was just the trouble. Was he too self-sufficient? Somehow she found herself irresistibly drawn to Dick Travers who needed her care and her love, but who belonged to another woman.

 

GRADE: B

 

BEST QUOTES:

“He’s under sixty and male—that makes him just your type.”

 

“Half of you is twice as much as any other woman.”

 

“I won’t deny your husband’s obvious charms, but charms were meant for bracelets, not marriage.”

 

“Why is it that the unhappy people of this world hold so much power over the happiness of others?”

 

“How those smashing waves and rough rocks must be torturing his tender stumps!”

 

“I didn’t lose my head, just my legs.”

 

REVIEW:

I’ve waited a while for a nurse novel as campy as this one—and camp is something I hold quite dear. So it is with disappointment that I must declare that as much as I wanted to adore this book, the story line just couldn’t match the zingy one-liners. Besides, I was disappointed that a novel called San Francisco Nurse gave us little apart from a dinner at Fisherman’s Wharf—where only tourists venture—of that fine city.

 

When Chief of Nurses Bret Ames first claps eyes on Dick Travers, he is a “sour apple.” In for a nephrectomy after stones destroyed his kidney, he is as mean as they come—and now, with just one kidney, “only half a man,” he despairs. But she has a way with these types, and so she gladly takes on the challenge of trying to perk him up. Darn it, though, he is just so stubborn! “Look, Little Miss Sunshine,” he snaps at her, “you can save the routine for vaudeville, it may come back some day and you’ll need it.” You can see why after just a couple of minutes of his bitterness, she’s ready to throw in the towel, and not just because “she felt piqued at being so thoroughly ignored. There was no admiration in those dark eyes when he looked at her tall, well-distributed figure.” The nerve!

 

She soon finds out what his problem is—it’s Virginia Travers, Dick’s malevolent wife, who drove him to the brink of bankruptcy, left him for a wealthier man, and then nearly ruined his reputation when she found out he was in love with one of his graduate students. Her sugar daddy played out and the grad student long frightened away, she’s returned to Dick’s side, insisting he take her back. “I know now what his trouble is—a she-devil wife,” Bret concludes.

 

Under the terrible strain of his loss of manhood and the return of his evil wife, Dick refuses to smile for Bret. She eventually loses her cool with him, calls him—to his face!—an “ungrateful sour apple,” and then surprisingly kisses him full on the lips. “Dear God, I’m in love with him! Completely, crazily in love!” Bret thinks to herself. And so we have yet another dopey heroine falling for a man who has been nothing but mean to her. It isn’t too long before he’s taking her in his arms and kissing her, but given the Mrs. stomping around the hospital on her stilettos, those scenes are few and followed by guilty quarrels, as Dick sees no way out of his marriage.

 

So, in an attempt to cool her jets, Bret oddly decides to go visit Mrs. Travers at her home on the Berkeley campus of State University (and times have certainly changed; she drives across the Bay Bridge at 35 mph and is not killed, and the toll is 25 cents—now it’s $6 during rush hour). There, she tells Mrs. Travers that she is going to marry Dr. Nels Larsen, a fabulous doctor and all-around swell guy. “Self-possessed, he needed no one’s reassurance or approbation,” she thinks of Nels on their second date. “She would never lose her identity as Nels’ wife. He would not demand that her every waking thought be devoted to him—he did not need that kind of reassurance.” Sounds like a peach! Naturally she’ll never be able to love him.

 

When Dick finds out about this, though—and Bret is oddly shocked and furious that the Mrs. should pass along the 411 about the engagement to her spouse—Dick turns right back into that sour apple. He’s nasty, cruel, and shows up at Bret’s engagement party to slap her with the news that he got divorced four days ago—it apparently not crossing his mind to let her know before the announcement party—and chews her out for not waiting for him, when he gave her no reason whatsoever to do so. He also dares to say that “Nels will never give you the chance to be yourself,” when this is the opposite of what Bret had thought of him. “Nels needs nothing from you to make him a man!” he claims, and then clubs her with his parting shot: “I became a man for you. But I overrated your courage by asking you to be a woman for me.” Whatever that means, it completely overlooks his effeminate lack of kidney.

 

But now all we have left is to undo the engagement between Nels and Bret and all will be right. For your further enjoyment, there’s a side plot about a young man whose legs had to be amputated after a car crash, his engagement to a nurse friend of Bret’s, and his insistence that he cannot marry Sue unless he, too, can “be a man,” even with mere stumps for legs. I’m not sure what all this manliness is all about and why it’s so important to the gents in this book, but it really doesn’t seem to be worth the trouble for them or for their lady friends.

 

I was also not impressed at the way Nels is built up as a great guy in the beginning of the book, only to be depicted as a completely different man when Bret needs to dump him. His character change lets Bret off the hook too easily; she should have to man up herself, acknowledging the simple truth that she can’t marry Nels because she loves someone else, regardless of what an ass that man is, and not pretend her fickleness is due to any alleged flaw Nels possesses. She neither has to make any effort to go after Dick, because the very second she decides that she’s through with Nels, Dick’s hand drops on her shoulder. So while the zingers are hilarious fun, and these alone make San Francisco Nurse worth reading, the plotting just doesn’t have the backbone to carry this book to the top of the mark.

Sandra Surgical Nurse

By Patti Stone, ©1961
Cover illustration by Bob Abbett

A surgeon tormented by his past—a beautiful nurse deeply in love. Two figures struggled through the midnight blizzard up to a lonely, snow-shrouded farmhouse. They were just in time. Working in the feeble glow of gaslight, a courageous doctor saved the life of a woman and her new-born baby. When it was over, the nurse spoke softly to her exhausted companion: “They would have died. Two lives saved because of you. You can forgive yourself now, can’t you?”
 
GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“I’m in for a nice hunk of broken heart and that’s something you can’t put together in Surgery.”

“If she is going to catch Tod, I’ll see to it that she’ll be one bride who is able to cook whether she wants to or not!”

REVIEW:
Sandra O’Shea is a “suture nurse” at Queens Hospital in Gereton, Indiana. This is apparently the equivalent of a scrub tech today, as she spends her days slapping instruments into surgeons’ hands. We meet her on her first day at Queens, as she’s just finished her training as a surgical nurse back home in Iowa. Her new workplace holds a bit of a mystery: Two surgeons who are brothers, Rand and Frank Cox, haven’t spoken to each other in two years. Of course, in a VNRN the mystery is quickly brought to light: The boys’ father was the chief of staff at the hospital, and on a hunting trip out in the boondocks with his sons he slipped and accidentally shot himself in the chest. At the nearest rinky-dink hospital, Dr. Rand had insisted on operating, though Dr. Frank had wanted him to be flown to a city hospital, and Rand attempted the surgery and their father died. Dr. Frank accused Dr. Rand of killing their father, and this had not exactly made for warm feelings at work.

On the job, we hear a lot about a couple of unusual physical traits Sandra has. She’s “a big girl, graceful even in the awkward surgical robe, and taller” than her surgeon. She is constantly obsessing over this: “How she hated her size!” When an intern congratulates her for being able to restrain a wild patient, she snaps, “I know exactly how big I am and that I’m a corn-fed country girl!” She tells her roommate she’ll never get a date: “I know what I look like. I’m too big and generously shaped.” She’s “too big and husky,” “much too big,” “a big lumbering peasant.” Mysteriously, after much moaning over this fact, it’s dropped halfway through the book, and we are only told in passing that she might not have made through that snowstorm if she hadn’t been so hale and hardy. But perhaps to make up for this particular deformity, she is one of the rare women in a VNRN who has the magical hands: “The hospital grapevine had already carried news of the new blond nurse with the soft voice and the strong skillful hands.”

Anyway, before long, the quiet, serious one—Rand—asks Sandra out on a date. But she can’t go, because she’s promised the church square-dancing group that she’d go to the dance that night. Drat! Then who should turn up at the dance but Dr. Frank, who is apparently stalking her? And when there’s an emergency and she and Dr. Frank have to go directly to the hospital in their square-dancing clothes, who should be there at the door when they come in but Dr. Rand? Double drat! He, of course, is convinced that Sandra is dating Frank and goes all Frigidaire on her—not that you can tell the difference from how he was before. So even though she really prefers the cold and frosty brother, she starts going out with good-time Frank. And Rand, Sandra tells her roommate, “ ‘is trying to stay away from me too. Oh, he still requests me for difficult operations, so I guess he doesn’t think I’m a total loss.’ Not as a nurse, she thought ruefully, but definitely a loss as a friend? As a woman?’ ”

Then during a Christmas Eve blizzard, when Sandra’s home alone feeling maudlin and full of self-pity, Rand pounds on her door. He needs her help to deliver a baby at this farmhouse out in the country. After Rand has saved both the baby and the mother, they drive back to town and Sandra invites him in for coffee cake. Before three minutes have passed, Rand has broken down over his belief that he killed his father, Sandra has comforted him, Rand has proposed marriage, and Sandra has planned the wedding: “Like any girl, I want my parents with me. I want to wear the most beautiful dress I can find, and my mother’s wedding veil—and of course I want to be married in church.” It’s to be a small wedding, though, close friends and family only, and her mother will make her dress, and well, “there will be all sorts of arrangements to be made. Maybe by rushing things we can be married on Easter Sunday.” Instead of running screaming for the door, Rand instead “agreed meekly.” And we still have 25 more pages to get through.

So to give us something to do, Dr. White, the aging Chief of Staff, obligingly drops with a heart attack in the OR, and despite open-heart massage, Rand is unable to save him. Dr. White’s gorgeous daughter calls Rand a murderer—it’s déjà vu all over again—and he runs off. While driving out to see him, Sandra and Frank witness a plane crash into a housing development. They’re trying to rescue a man trapped in a burning house when the building collapses on them. Frank’s arm is badly injured, and the doctors at the hospital are insisting that it must be amputated—though it would mean the end of Frank’s career as a surgeon. Only Rand believes the arm can be saved, and calls in a prominent orthopedic surgeon. As he’s wheeled into the OR, Frank apologizes to Rand for calling him a murderer, and now the only thing left to be saved is Sandra’s Easter wedding …

The best thing about this book is the surgery. It’s accurately described, and we get lots of it: a Whipple, an appendectomy, a Caesarian, and of course the fight to save Frank’s arm. I also liked Sandra’s relationship with her roommate, Peggi (yes, spelled with an i), though I wished Peggi weren’t so obsessed with “catching” intern Tod, who runs hot and cold on her. Beyond that, though, this books runs toward the saccharine, and Sandra’s attraction to the dour Rand is completely inexplicable. The cover is great (apparently Richard Prince thought so too; part of it is featured in his work “Nurse in Hollywood #4”), but the book is not much.

Army Nurse

By Barbara Bonham, ©1965
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

“I can’t believe it,” Connie said in a stunned voice to the Communist agent. “We were so sure she was dead. Can you get her out of China?” “For a price,” Bo Duc said. “You could be very useful to us.” Connie shuddered. It was the cruelest form of blackmail, one the Communists used masterfully. “You devils!” she said through clenched teeth. Lt. Constance Moorehead had two great secrets—her war mission and her love for Captain Harmon. To carry out her duty she was prepared to risk her loyalty, her love, and even her life.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“What’s a gorgeous girl like you doing in this place?”
“Fighting Communism,” Connie replied.

“Connie had had to hold herself back the last few times Niles had kissed her to keep her lips from revealing her love for him.”

“I’m familiar with Communist tactics. I cut my teeth on them.”

“And you guys think you can conquer the world! You can’t even make a decent whisky.”

REVIEW:
Lt. Constance Moorehead is the first nurse heroine I’ve met who isn’t white – she’s biracial, as her mother was Chinese. Her parents met when her American father was teaching English in China, but when Connie was six years old, the Communists began to overrun China, and her family fled the country on a sampan for Hong Kong. En route, however, they were strafed by a Communist patrol boat, and her mother was killed. Which explains her burning hatred for the Commies. Now that she’s 22, she’s enlisted in the army has been stationed in the Southeast Asian country of Surbaco, which is struggling against a Communist take-over, serving capitalism the only way a girl can. “Nursing the wounded is the next best thing to actually carrying a gun against the Communists myself,” she says.

As much as she hates the Communists, she loves Capt. Niles Harmon, MD, whom she just met a month ago. He’s attracted to her “mysterious and exotic beauty,” as he puts it. Then Bo Duc, the waiter at the officer’s club, jumps out of the bushes next to the nurses’ quarters and tells her that the Communists have her grandmother. Unless she cooperates with them, they will kill Nana. She responds with the most vehement curse she can think of: “You devils!” she spits through clenched teeth. But she proves to be somewhat resourceful: She sends a letter to American Ambassador Kilby, who checks into the hospital six hours later, complaining of chest pain. Connie can’t get over the coincidence, but guess what? It’s all a big hoax so he can talk to Connie alone! He tells her to cooperate with Bo Duc for now, as they may have an opportunity to track down the communist leader through him. Though Dr. Niles is perplexed that he can’t figure out what’s wrong with the ambassador, he doesn’t suspect anything. Yet.

Connie leaves a window open in the supply room along with a list of the supplies that the bad guys need. Niles, discovering the break-in, sees Connie slip the list, which the thieves have inconveniently left behind, into her pocket. You’d think this would be an opportunity to bring up Connie’s racial background and use it against her, but Dr. Niles is made of sterner stuff, and just frowns. But the Commies aren’t satisfied, and soon come back with another assignment: She’s to put a bomb under the bed of the Surbacoan president. A few days later, at a ball at the president’s mansion, Dr. Niles catches her coming out of the president’s living quarters. The president, who has been informed of the plot by Ambassador Kilby (who Connie keeps in the loop), isn’t hurt, the scuttlebutt goes, because an aide had woken him to take care of an important matter that had just come up. Niles ups the ante and gives her the cold shoulder on rounds that afternoon.

Next the Communists kidnap Connie and Niles, dragging them out into the jungle to care for their general. Connie doesn’t have enough time to contact Ambassador Kilby, but she does manage to mail a letter – though she has no idea where in the jungle they are to be taken, so things are looking glum for the medical team. At first Niles is pretty pissed – “You lousy traitor!” he hisses at Connie – but after they’ve amputated the general’s gangrenous foot and they have a minute alone, she fills him in on her double-agent duties, and soon they’re smooching behind the general’s tent. But the Commies are threatening to kill them both as soon as the general is better. Will they be found in time?

As action-packed as the plot may seem in the retelling, I just couldn’t bring myself to care whether Connie and Niles were rescued or not. The ending was wholly predictable, the writing uninspired, and the only fun in it from the puerile jabs at communism. It’s interesting for its view on war in Southeast Asia at a time when the country was actually fighting one there, but apart from that, it’s pretty much a waste of time.

Surgical Nurse

By Florence K. Palmer, ©1963
Cover illustration by Robert Maguire

It was love at first sight when Surgical Nurse Sloane McBain met Dr. Vince Alvord, senior resident and head surgeon at Mercy, engaged to socialite Valerie Cosgrove, a very jealous and possessive woman. Sloane knew she had to hide her feelings for Vince if she was to continue assisting him in the operating room. But how was a girl supposed to control her emotions when she worked so closely with the man who filled all her thoughts? Sloane knew she had to find the answer to her dilemma before it interfered with her duty as a nurse—and her integrity as a woman.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“He won’t marry me until either I go on a diet or he gets a practice going. He says no intern can afford my appetite!”

“Dedication is admirable in any field, but a woman wants to be looked at as a woman, not a potential laboratory specimen or the inspiration of a piece of advertising copy. A woman, any woman, wants to feel she’s needed and cherished, if it’s only for the span of a casual date.”

“They can sew starts together with that darned Space Needle for all I care!”

“Let’s go apartment hunting. It’ll take our minds off the dumb public maybe.”

“One of our profs in med school used to tell us that R.N. is short for real necessary to doctors.”

“He does have the hands of a surgeon, she thought, unaware that she’d said it aloud. ‘I hope they are.’ Nick spread the sensitive, yet steel-firm fingers, and stood staring down at them. ‘The hands of an obstetrician, too, and an internist, and a minister, and a friend—I’m just asking them to be the hands of a family doctor.’ ”

“ ‘When I was on surgery, it was the strangest feeling—’ she said, remembering the white glare of lights beating down, the click of instruments, and the ever-new wonder of seeing sick, broken bodies respond to a surgeon’s inspired touch. ‘It’s hard to describe, you aren’t yourself. For an hour, two hours, you’re almost a part of Creation itself.’ ”

“I know you want to help humanity and all that jazz, but doesn’t it make more sense to marry me and go at it from a different angle?”

“She’d been assigned to Surgery and was a regular member of Mercy’s operating team—anesthesiologist at the table’s head, assistant resident and surgical intern at one side, the attending surgeon across. And by his side, a pair of hands; hands to anticipate the instrument required next, passing retractor or forcep or scalpel the instant it was demanded; hands that blotted sweat and counted sponges; hands threading a curved needle with black silk for suture ladders—Nurse Sloane McBain’s hands.”

“It seems to me being a nurse must be like holding your finger on the pulse beat of humanity, and maybe getting a glimpse of God.”

“A guy doesn’t want his wife jockeying bedpans, or whatever you do there at Mercy.”

“Fine thing. A whole evening of Valerie, and me without an aspirin to my name.”

REVIEW:
Sloane McBain is a scrub nurse living in Seattle with fellow nurse Dena Williams, who is engaged to Dr. Joe Dardis. Sloane is, of course, checking out the doctors on staff, but there are only two options. Dr. Nick Lawton is so fiercely dedicated to pathology that Sloane crosses him off her list: “I’m not about to compete with a corpuscle,” she tells Dena. This leaves the dashing Dr. Vince Alvord, a silver-haired 30-something surgeon who looks down on Nick and Joe for their interest in becoming GPs. He shows interest in Sloane—but alas, he is engaged to the stunning, wealthy socialite Val Cosgrove. So he asks her to work with him in the OR instead, where she watches “the awesome flash of scalpel and the healing deftness of Vincent Alvord’s fingers. And because her own alert skill flowed into his, the sense of being a part of him strengthened daily.” After a particularly tough case, she asks him in for coffee, and before long they’re kissing in the living room. “A cozy twosome—for heaven’s sake, he’d think she was as predatory as the rest of them!”

One of their patients, Johnny O’Brien, a diabetic 16-year-old who works at the hospital and plans to become a doctor, loses his leg and the will to go on. Sloane, who has cared for Johnny for weeks, tries shock treatment: She tells him, “I didn’t realize your mind was crippled too—of course you can’t ever be a doctor now!” This is exactly what young Johnny needs, and soon he can’t wait to get at those crutches! But then one day in the OR, as she’s deep in thought about how Dr. Alvord’s fiancée “should be down on her knees to a man like him,” she misses the call for a clamp and the mighty doctor has to ask for it twice before he gets the instrument he needs to stem a spurting artery. The patient dies just as the surgeons are closing, and Sloane is convinced that it’s her fault: “Did she lose too much blood because I was day-dreaming?” So she quits the OR and goes to work in admitting.

Torn to bits that she has killed this patient, Sloane literally cries on Dr. Alvord’s shoulder at a dance when his fiancée—and the entire room—is watching. Val is wild with fury and makes a veiled threat to Sloane, “the pupils of her gray-green eyes dilated to a consuming black.” Sloane recognizes this as a sign of deep mental illness: “Jealousy is sometimes only a symptom, the outward manifestation, of deep emotional trauma. If the cause isn’t found and treated, such injuries to the psyche may lead to serious complications.”

She’s still spending time with both doctors: Nick and Joe are working on an artificial leg for Johnny with an old dentist friend of Sloane’s, which means they all hang out at Sloane’s apartment talking the matter over. As for Dr. Alvord, his fiancée postpones the wedding, so he comes to Sloane to hash it all out. He takes her out to dinner at the public market, where he used to work when he was young and poor. He explains to Sloane that he has vowed he will never be hungry again. This is why he picked surgery, because you can make the most money. He met Val’s father when he was still a young doctor, and the rich man opened doors for him, including, apparently, the one to his daughter’s bedroom. But, Dr. Alvord sighs, Val just doesn’t understand the demands of a doctor’s life. Only a nurse would, he says, making Sloane’s heart leap, but then he adds, “The truth is, nurses seldom have a private Fort Knox to draw on, and gals like Val do.” Sloane finally begins to see the tarnish on the doctor’s halo. “You’re so right,” she answers. “Nurses seldom have anything that counts—except a pin with R.N. on it!”

When the doctor drops her off at the hospital, Nick borrows Dr. Alvord’s car and Sloane to go see Johnny try his new leg, which is a success. On their way out, Sloane tells Johnny to keep working at rehab, even if it’s not easy. “Being crippled is what’s easy—you ought to know!” he snarls at her, an apparent reference to her quitting the OR. On their way home, Sloane is distraught and Nick parks the car on a dark street to comfort her. Another car slowly passes them, then speeds up … In the final scene, the crazed Val shows up at Sloane’s apartment with what is apparently a vial of poison, and every man Sloane has ever met shows up at the apartment to rescue her, and Sloane has to choose between Dr. Alvord and Nick, and even Val gets a nice man to take her off to the psych ward. Then someone needs surgery unexpectedly, and the only scrub nurse around is Sloane …

This is a pretty good book, a bit along the lines of the older VNRNs, with two women in their own apartment with busy social lives but also a strong relationship of their own. Sloane’s manufactured career crisis is a bit weak, her reaction way over the top for what was a minor transgression. But the characters are well-drawn and fun to watch, and there’s a good dose of camp throughout. I was intrigued to find, after reading more than 100 VNRNs, a passage devoted to the nurse’s hands (as opposed to the doctor’s, about which we hear much in virtually every book) and their importance in medicine. Ultimately, though, while there wasn’t anything that really elevated this book into the extraordinary, this is a good book overall, and worth reading.