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.

Hurricane Nurse

By Joan Sargent
(pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham), ©1962 

A hurricane in Miami draws a cautiously mixed assemblage to the Flamingo Elementary School for shelter. Among them are: Donna Ledbury, red-haired school nurse, the current girlfriend of the school principal. Hank Fincher, who, according to the school grapevine, had a new girl each year, and who had just jilted Mary Hendley, first-grade teacher, who still carried a torch for Hank; Cliff Warrender, a “gangster” lawyer in Donna’s opinion, but whose worse fault was in defending the oppressed whether they were in the right or not; Melissa and Jack Hartson, whose first baby was destined to be born in the cafeteria of the school, with the aid of Donna and Baby LaRue, an ex-strip-teaser, now in her seventies, who welcomed the hurricane season as a relief from the humdrum of life; Old Dr. and Mrs. Ward, gentle people whose greatest fear was of dying and leaving the other alone—a fear that was never to be realized because of the hurricane; Dusty Hosey and his leather-coated gang of teen-agers, who came looking for trouble, but found their match—and incidentally, friends—in the school nurse and Cliff Warrender. There were others, of course, at the schoolhouse during those three days of the storm, but how the lives of these people were changed by a cataclysm of nature makes an exciting and intensely human nurse story.

GRADE: D

BEST QUOTES:
“You’re polite enough for a divorced couple meeting for the first time in public.” 

“Nothing draws two people together like a common dislike.”

“Wouldn’t it be painful to be the complete lady all the time?”

“New lipstick had made the menace of the storm seem less imminent.”

“Even if you haven’t been here but a month, surely you have heard of hurricane parties? They’re one of the nicest features of our fair city.”

REVIEW:
You’d think a major hurricane bearing down on a school full of frightened Floridians would make for an interesting book. Though there are quite a few adventures in this Hurricane Nurse (see also Peggy Gaddis’ version with the same title), unfortunately the story dwells mostly in stupidity—and the primary sinner unfortunately is our heroine, Donna Ledbury. She is a 22-year-old school nurse about to experience her first hurricane, which she did not realize means that she has to ride out the storm at the school with whatever refugees show up, though that seems an important part of a job description to neglect to mention to your new hiree. She’s not alone, though; principal Henry Fincher is there to lend a hand. He’s a rather hot guy, and the pair have dated a few times—and “she liked Hank. She always had fun when they went out together. But was that love?” Well, a hurricane is certainly just the ticket to help her figure it out!

So off she goes to the high school, unfortunately accompanied by Cliff Warrender. “He was a lawyer, not the sort of lawyer she wanted to know. ‘A mouthpiece’ they called his sort in gangster novels. He had got Genio (the Ox) Alcotti off from a bookie charge. She didn’t want to be friendly with Cliff Warrender.” She’s even scornful of the fact that he is well dressed, though “there was nothing garish about him.” The problem with him in my view is that he comes on too strong, constantly saying things like, “This is my girl, but she hasn’t caught onto it yet,” adding that he’s going to win her over despite her prejudices. She snaps back, for some strange reason, “If you are implying that red-haired girls are man-crazy—”. But Cliff just helps her into the car and off they go to the market where he purchases lots of helpful supplies, and everyone greets him like he’s their best friend. But she’s angry that he’s going to defend a woman who was arrested for shoplifting, even though the woman told him she did it. “She was disgusted with him,” we are told, but the sad part is that Cliff never is allowed to explain to this moron what defense attorneys do, that they are there to keep the system honest and keep people from being given unfair sentences if they are convicted. So her prejudice against his occupation is never dealt with in any satisfactory way, just swept under the rug.

Over at the high school, people show up—even after the hours after which the staff is supposed to turn away anyone seeking shelter, like that’s a good idea? There’s a 90-something couple married for 65 years, each expressing privately to Donna that they can’t imagine how the other will survive after the other dies. There’s a gang of “smart alec” “young squirts,” initially sassy to Donna, but quickly brought in check by Cliff, before he takes off on a run to the hospital to obtain medical supplies that Donna never thought to bring. Baby Larue, a 70-year-old former stripper, shows up in a tiny dress and three-inch stilettos, and carrying her mangy parrot, which Donna stuffs in a locker in the dispensary and promptly forgets about.

Once the storm gets underway, the hijinks ensue! A bunch of middle-aged men show up with cards and whisky, and spend about two solid days gambling, only to take a break for a knife fight, which Donna treats with a tourniquet. Later Donna hears loud voices in the hall and “resolved to do nothing about it.” It turns out it’s a married couple and the husband is beating the wife. With a crowd watching, the man “hit her with his fist with force enough to lift her from her feet. She fell several feet away, whimpering, accusing, begging somebody, anybody, to save her from being killed. None made a move. They only stood.” When Hank finally steps in and is knocked unconscious, Donna, too, just stands and watches. “She did not move to Hank’s side”; only Hank’s wannabe girlfriend comes to his aid. Which is appropriate for a woman who’s always saying that she’s not allowed to do anything unless a doctor tells her, but still!

Then one of the women staying there is robbed of $100, and one of the male refugees is found to have given the kids marijuana. But Donna, now back in her manic phase, insists that everything is fine: “We haven’t had any crime, not really,” she insists, “still argumentative.” “And we haven’t had a death,” she adds—but she should be careful what she wishes for, because while having cake with the old couple, a palm frond comes flying through the window and whacks the old lady on the head, killing her instantly—and her husband has a fatal heart attack at exactly the same instant. Donna’s first words after this calamity, interestingly, are, “I’m glad,” because now they won’t have to be alone. Awww.

You will not be surprised to learn that as soon as the lights go out, though, Donna falls apart. Her hands start trembling, and she’s convinced that everyone in the place is going to die, especially a young woman in labor who can’t walk from one building to another, yet is “pacing up and down, flinging her arms about wildly, moaning and muttering” during her contractions, wailing, “Why doesn’t my mother come? She would stop all this hurting. I want my mother.” Donna is equally helpless: “She had a sudden picture of the girl dying because she was inept, because she was ignorant, because it was dark.” Soon it’s “time for her to grow more nervous, to feel more helpless.” As Cliff heads off to let her deliver the baby in peace, she’s “fighting off the desire to cling to his arm, to beg him not to leave her alone with the responsibility that was hers.” Everyone really needs to pull themselves together! But Baby Larue shows up with some whiskey, gets the mother-to-be drunk—with Donna’s permission—and stays to help, proving to be of far more worth than Donna: “Baby had a good deal of practical experience with the work in hand. And best of all, she remained self-confident and cheerful.” In the next sentence, the baby is born, and now Donna starts worrying that the baby is being held by too many germy people. “I do hope she’ll stay well. We haven’t been able to keep her in sterile places, and she’s already been handled by unsterile people.”

Now one of the young kids in the place gets sick, and Donna promptly starts obessing again: “She fervently prayed that it would not turn out to be acute appendicitis, with an operation indicated.” Guess what? It’s not! But what is it? “Polio? Scarlet fever?” As more of the kids start dropping with the same symptoms, she spends literally two days worrying about what it might be—until the first kid gets a scarlet rash, and now she’s so relieved, because it’s just measles! Even though most of them have gotten their vaccinations!

Between caring for sick kids, she’s starting to flirt more with Cliff, who again and again proves himself to be useful and reliable. But “she didn’t believe that Cliff was the man for her. She honestly couldn’t approve of his idea of the practice of law. He spent most of his time defending criminals. The right sort of lawyer would defend the law, not support those who broke it.” Then, in a very bizarre scene, Donna joins the teenagers dancing in the gym and completely loses control while dancing with one of the hoodlums. When the dance stops, “she saw disapproval in hard adult faces,” and she’s pretty much shunned—Principal Hank even suggests that she may lose her job after such a shocking loss of decorum. “She had made a spectacle of herself. She felt shamed by the scorn of the older faces,” and for the rest of the book she’s apologizing for disgracing herself and the school. But what she’s really upset about is that Cliff had gone off to talk to another woman while Donna was dancing, giving her “a feeling of being lost in the great reaches of the universe, as lost as a child who knows not where to go. Somehow it was in the midst of that feeling of being lost that she knew she was in love with Cliff Warrender.” But wait! Two sentences later, “I can’t be in love with him. I have more sense than to get a crush on a stranger. Even a crush. Certainly I wouldn’t fall in love with one.”

Again and again while reading this book I was overcome with the desire to slap Nurse Donna Ledbury silly. She is badly trained and without the disposition to be caring for a complex group of refugees with few supplies and even less sense; she’s frequently telling everyone that she does not have the authority to dispense medicines, bandage wounds or practice any kind of medicine apart from taking temperatures—but she can’t sterilize the thermometers, so there’s only so many times she can do that. “Nurses don’t give whiskey to patients except on order from a doctor,” she says, after she’s already gotten the mother-to-be drunk. She is a complete disaster as a nurse and as a human being, and I could only feel pity for the man she ended up with. I don’t want to have to pity you, too, so take my advice and run for shelter if you happen to encounter this appallingly awful Hurricane Nurse.

 

Theatre Nurse

By Hilda Pressley Nickson, ©1960 

Catharine Manton was beautiful and efficient, and “her” operating theatre was perfectly run. Why, then, did the new R.S.O. declare that he couldn’t possibly work with her, even if it meant that he—not she—would have to leave the hospital?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“True greatness did indeed go hand-in-hand with humility.”

“Some surgeons are like that. They love to dramatize.”

REVIEW:
Catharine Manton is a young but highly skilled nurse, so much so that she’s been promoted to Theatre Sister, which in the UK means she is the head nurse in charge of the OR. She’s kind, efficient, organized—and also, of course, very beautiful. This is a big problem—when the new chief surgeon, Dr. Peter Wingate, shows up, there is big trouble! He pales the minute he claps eyes on her, and “there was no mistaking the scorn in his eyes now, and the look of bitter contempt.” He declares that he cannot work with such a young nurse, apparently having nothing against her except her youth and looks—and possibly also that he first came across her in the arms of Dr. Ray White, staff anesthesiologist, whom she’s known since she was a girl and has no romantic inclinations toward. It is a curious feature in nurse novels that the heroines frequently go on dates and kiss men in whom they frankly state they have no interest.

By a huge coincidence, the biggest slacker nurse in the hospital, Sylvia Cleveland, is transferred to the OR the day before Dr. Wingate arrives, and soon it becomes clear—eventually widely known—that the pair are very close, engaged even! This makes Catharine’s ability to discipline Sylvia, and leads to more trouble, but the whole story of Peter’s animosity is unclear; we overhear him moaning to Sylvia that Catharine looks “so incredibly like Evelyn,” and soon he’s given notice that he will leave the hospital. Unfortunately, he must stay a month or two until they find a replacement—how will the pair be able to work together in that time?

In the meantime Catharine dates Ray, much to the increasing consternation of her best friend Nurse Sue Hickey, and also steps out with another surgeon, Sir John Watkins. Too early in the book, we are suddenly told that Catharine is in love with Peter. He has been nothing but mean, prejudiced and even slanderous of Catharine, but all of a sudden, literally dropped from the blue into a paragraph, we learn that “she had fallen in love with a man who could barely stand the sight of her. What could be more ironical, more heartbreaking?” Stupid plot twists rank high in heartbreak, but even I must admit are not worse than that.

Now, driven by Peter’s accusations that she’s a silly flirt—and Sue’s increasing hostility toward her, which stems from Catharine’s continuing to go out with Ray when he tells her he’s in love with her—she finally decides to stop seeing anyone at all. Then, driven by her curiosity, she heads off for a surgery conference at the same hospital that Peter had come from, and there meets a friend who had once been on the staff at her current hospital. The friend tells Catharine that Peter the previous year had done a nephrectomy during which the patient died, and that he had blamed himself for being distracted by surgery nurse Evelyn Kilster, with whom he had been engaged, even though it turned out that she was a mean, cruel person.

Then she heads back to the hospital and waits around for Peter’s term to expire. Meanwhile she grows increasingly fond of nurse Sylvia, whose prior claims have ruined her hopes, and Peter even kisses her “cruelly” a few times—another plot device that is not a good one, and is in fact rather creepy, particularly since after the first time, he snarls, “I hope that satisfies you. That’s what you wanted, isn’t it? You, with your soft words and your limpid blue eyes. I hate and despise you!” This man needs therapy—and she needs a restraining order.

Of course, everything and everyone is sorted out in the end. Catharine, with her sturdy professionalism and faith, assists Peter in a nephrectomy in which no one dies or is distracted and his confidence is restored, and there’s a little twist in regards to Sylvia and Peter. Unfortunately, there are a number of loose ends that never get tucked away—Catharine is convinced she’s seen Sylvia somewhere before, and how the initial nephrectomy patient actually died or why Peter thought he had killed them, but we never learn the answers to these questions. Overall the book isn’t badly written, and I did enjoy some of the characters and relationships. But the falling in love out of nowhere with a man who doesn’t deserve it is one of my least favorite tropes. So I just couldn’t love Theatre Nurse, either.

The Hospital World of Susan Wray

By Anne Lorraine ©1965 

Susan became aware that the doctor was watching her. He leaned back in his chair, studying her small office, the bookshelves laden with medical books, and, slightly incongruous amongst such technical matter, a row of brightly covered detective novels. He noted the vase of flowers on the mantel, the only apparent concession to feminine love of decoration. “It’s a good room,” he told her suddenly, unexpectedly. “A good place in which to forget hospital existed. It’s like an oasis, right in the heart of suffering and fear. It reminds me somehow of you, sister. There is something strong, unshakable, a quiet serenity about it, such as you carry with you in your work.” Susan stared at him, her eyes dark with surprise. This—the moody, intractable Dr. More? He had always seemed oblivious of her presence, yet evidently such had not been the case. She felt confused and embarrassed at his words. Thus begins to story of a nurse and doctor whose personal and professional lives are to merge.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Young folk are afraid of truth, because it hurts, it hurts like the devil. It’s only when you’re old and tired, like me, that you know it’s the only decent thing in the world—is truth. You learn to love it, then, you let it stick into your heart, and you don’t even feel the pain.” 

“‘Want to hear about the abscess now?’ he inquired, and she forced a look of interest into her face.”

“We demand so much from life—we expect to marked off our minds into little water-tight compartments—this much for my work, this much for my love, this much for the world in general—we get hurt and upset when we discover that our minds are not water-tight, any more than are our emotions.”

“So many of you doctors approach the patient in the same way as a butcher would approach a delectable carcass, and with about as much visible feeling!”

REVIEW:
Susan Wray begins her book with two common tropes around her neck: (1) Her fiancé Jimmie Preston is paralyzed from a car crash, and (2) her younger sister Dinah is a flighty, undedicated nurse working under her supervision at a small English country Hospital. Susan herself is an outstanding nurse, with “a bottomless well of human understanding and tolerance,” loved by patiens and nursing students alike, who speaks “quietly,” “serenely,” “imperturbably,” “softly,” “carefully,” “gently,” or “calmly” on every page. She is incomprehensibly devoted to Jimmie, whom she visits without fail for a couple hours every week, when she begs him to marry her, and he refuses. “I wanted to devote my life to him, to work day and night to bring health and strength back to him,” she explains to a patient. “I could make him well.” But Jimmie refuses to marry until he can walk again, per usual. 

Sister Dinah became a nurse only after their parents died and Susan, it seems, forced her to, but she hates it! Then up turns the mysterious Dr. David Wright, exiled to their back-water hospital because of some terrible mistake he’s made. “I she’ll never touch a knife again as long as I live,” declares the once-famous brain surgeon, and one assumes he won’t be ordering anything less than fillet mignon for dinner, less it be too tough for his fork to handle. In his presence, however, Dinah goes to pieces, and David also pales—and it takes a while for their secret to out: They once worked together, and he had a tricky postop patient whom he left in her care—but she had a date and ran down to the nurse’s station to ask if someone to cover for her, and the patient died in the five minutes she was out of the room. The patient’s unattended death was such a scandal that Dr. Wright was sent packing—a ludicrously implausible story, not improved by Dinah’s eventual confession that she’d been asked to monitor the patient, which somehow completely exonerates Dr. Wright and gets him his old job back.

Enter trope #3: We meet Dr. Jonathan More, who is an amazing physician but who is always irritated; Susan calls them “the most cynical, work-absorbed, uninteresting, dull man.” Despite her vows to have as little to do with him as possible, you will not be shocked to discover the cold automaton is soon feverishly clasping her hands and declaring in a hoarse whisper, “It’s you I love, understand?” But after their passionate embrace in the garden, he reveals he is married! Who will Susan and up with in the end?

In the interim, there is the story of a woman OB, Dr. Teresa Drake, who thinks her husband has fathered an illegitimate child and who agrees to adopt a baby based on the village gossip, bizarrely deciding never to ask her husband if the rumors are true. Along the same vein of never seek out the truth no matter how hard it is pounding on your door, Susan also shuts down poor Dr. More every time he tries to tell her about his wife, who clearly does not live with him. What we have here is a failure to communicate.

We are also given conflicting messages about women’s roles: Dr. Drake tells Susan repeatedly how wrong she was not to have had children. “A woman is never completed, or utterly happy, until she has produced a child her own.” Since Dr. Drake ends up adopting, we can assume that her declarations of how happy she is are untrue, since she did not produce the child in question. For her part, Susan decides that “only by sacrificing her career could she ever prove to Jimmie that she loved him,” and when she has finally settled on a man, she tells him, “If you would prefer me to give up my work—I’ll give it up.” (To his credit, the gentleman in question is shocked, and answers, “Your heart has always been in this work, and I’m willing to share your heart with your work, might dear—more than willing.”

If it’s a mostly pleasant, meandering tour of the relationships in Susan Wray’s life, this book doesn’t offer much that’s new or interesting; rather the opposite, I’m afraid, and it’s therefore mildly annoying to watch the same old story lines play out as predictably as they usually do. If only the plotting were better, Susan Wray’s hospital world would be a place worth spending your time.

 

Her Soul to Keep

By Marguerite Mooers Marshall, ©1940

With all the fire of youth, Nurse Joyce Randolph served her great profession at St. Botolph’s, a vast New York City hospital. Fighting her lonely duels with death in the long night watches, she was sustained by her love for Dr. Warren Faulkner, brilliant young surgeon. And then one terrifying morning disaster struck. Joyce was called into her supervisor’s office. A patient had died from an overdose of morphine. The evidence pointed to Joyce. Trustingly she turned to Dr. Warren, the doctor on the case, to clear her name. But he refused to come to her defense! Bewildered, grief-stricken, believing her future in ruins, Joyce fled to a tiny fishing village to try to pick up the pieces of a shattered life.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The woman who could not do her own dirty work in a boat or in the woods had better stay at home.”

“You haven’t got a thermometer so you can’t take my temperature. It might give you quite a shock if you did.”

REVIEW:
I’d been saving this, the last of the nurse novels by Marguerite Mooers Marshall, who is one of my favorite VNRN authors, and I’m shocked to find out that it’s been more than seven years since I read her third book—hard to believe I’ve been doing this blog for so long. The problem with all that anticipation is that sometimes a book does not deserve it. I have to say that this was not one of her best—but even one of her “worst” books is so much better than most other nurse novels out there that it’s hard to feel terribly disappointed. 

Nurse Joyce Randolph is working at a New York City hospital on the night shift, and the sloppy day nurse, Evelyn Adams, is late again. In an attempt to help cover for her colleague, little though she deserves it, Joyce gives the morning dose of morphine but does not document it, as it would be in her handwriting (those were the days) and would therefore out Evelyn, who would have been the one to give the dose if she’d showed up on time. The patient is the daughter of the chair of the hospital board of trustees, so she’s to get VIP treatment—but what she gets is a double dose of morphine when Dr. Warren Faulkner shows up later. Though Evelyn has told him that Joyce already gave the morphine, he believes the patient when she says Joyce withheld it out of meanness, and orders Evelyn give another 10 mg morphine—and the patient promptly dies.

Joyce is immediately fired and, worse, blackballed from nursing altogether, because Evelyn is now saying that Joyce never told her about the first injection—and Dr. Faulkner refuses to defend Joyce, the rat! It turns out that Dr. Faulkner is hoping to get a plum job with a senior surgeon, and word that he had ordered the fatal dose would make him unworthy of such a post, so he has asked Evelyn to lie for him. He asks Joyce to not fight her dismissal, too, but the hitch here is that he is her boyfriend and, she hopes, her future husband. “That the brilliant young physician she admired so much should lie to cover an error in judgment—even a fatal error—was bad enough. But that he should connive with Evelyn Adams, entrust his professional honor to her keeping—oh, how could he, how could he?” She’s overlooked the part where her beloved has asked her to sacrifice her entire career for a small blot on his, but eventually she remembers that and storms off.

He’s back later, though, insisting on her silence and promising to marry her in the fall if she stands by him. But “she could not so soon forget all that had happened. Not only unjust blame, rankling humiliation, threatened banishment from the work she loved. Under everything else, the sense of betrayal by one trusted, the discovery of weakness in what she had taken for strength.” She tells him she won’t see him for two months, and trundles off during a hurricane to her roommate Sally Scott’s beach cottage, which is somewhere on Long Island, ten miles from Manhattan. It’s in a community of similar houses, all without electricity, though they do have running water, and she’s floundering around on the boardwalk in the blinding rain when she literally runs into—not the first time that’s happened!—Roger Kent, a former newspaper journalist who became disenchanted with the politics of his beat and, rather than get a new assignment, quit altogether and moved to the island to write a novel.

Most of the ensuing book is about her life on the island: Boating and fishing with Roger, lying on the beach, meeting the neighbors as they move in with the warming weather. It’s an idyllic life, and enjoyable to watch, but apart from bandaging an occasional burned finger or packing a hot appendix off to the hospital, there’s not much nursing. Eventually Roger declares his love for her, but Joyce is waiting for her feelings for Warren to reveal themselves. Interestingly, she acknowledges that mainly what she feels for him is lust: “Honestly she faced the fact that he, more than any other man, had stirred her senses. Contact as a nurse with the darker by-products of sex could not destroy its glamor and glory. One did learn, however, to apply perspective to passion.” Which she seems unable to do. When Warren does turn up, “safety—Warren’s safety—seemed to remain his first thought!” She smooches him anyway, but when he sort-of proposes—he asks her to wear his fraternity pin, how adorable!—she says she needs more time to think. He’ll be spending that time in Bar Harbor, where he has to go to care for a “sick patient,” which we of course can see right through.

It’s a classic VNRN plot that we saw coming from early on, and though Joyce is a smart, determined, sassy, intelligent, hard-working young woman, she cannot foresee how this is going to play out until the engagement announcement is printed in the Times. I do wish Joyce had figured out her feelings on her own, because it’s not really growth if everything is thrust upon you. I liked Roger, who kept telling her that “even in love one has one’s soul to keep, that when love demanded the constant sacrifice of integrity it was more than the traffic would bear.” He, unlike Warren—who has told her that her destroyed career doesn’t matter, since she’d be chucking it anyway when they got married!—has assumed she will continue nursing, because “you can’t stop being yourself just because we’re in love.” The writing has a poetic feel to it, particularly in passages describing the ocean and the beach, and numerous references to poets and writers including Emerson, Kipling, Keats, da Vinci, George Bernard Shaw, and a sprinkling of ancient Greeks and Biblical references. Marshall’s hometown of Kingston, NH, makes a cameo, here and in her other books, as Belltown, along with nearby Campton (née Hampton) Beach and Axter (aka Exeter)—which you may not care about, but I do, since I’m from the New Hampshire Seacoast, and I share Marshall’s pride in the beauty of her home state. I’m disappointed that this book did not live up to Marshall’s best works (Nurse into Woman and Wilderness Nurse, both A-grade books), but I’ll repeat that it’s easily worth spending an afternoon on the beach with this book.

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The Youngest Night Nurse

By Anne Durham, ©1968

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Beth Halliday didn’t know how she could have coped with all the bewildering details of hospital life without the kindly help of the Senior Surgical Registrar, Desmond Angrave … but she must beware of feeling too grateful to him, as she realized when his old friend, the beautiful Frandora Nye, became a patient in her ward.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Perhaps it was even possible to make disaster happen, because of one’s state of mind.”

“Awful waste of nurse-power goes on in hospitals. Lots of girls get fed up and leave, to go into other  jobs or to get married. Not the best way of getting married, come to think of it.”

“Alas, we men don’t always look to the best in our womenfolk. We are foolish at rock bottom, and to be pitied.”

“A pretty woman should be clinging, anxious to please, but only too ready to take guidance from a man.”

REVIEW:

Beth Halliday is another VNRN orphan who, after her Gran died, took up nursing. She’s apparently a full-fledged nurse but is still so green they don’t let her care for patients—good thing, too, because she’s quite a bungler: “If anyone was going to drop the metal BPs as they were taken out of the cleansing machine, it would surely be Beth. If there was going to be burnt fingers or boiling water slopped on the floor when a hot water bottle was filled from the sterilizer, that, too, would be Beth.” As a result, she’s constantly being chewed out by the senior staff, and her gaffes are known throughout the hospital. The reason for this, one fellow nurse tells her, is that “you care so much and everyone can see it, and it just challenges them to nag at you for something or other.” She’s so good, she sucks.

Outside of the hospital, though, she’s confident, outgoing and friendly, to the point that she takes Dr. Overton, a “silly, pompous” pathologist “who shrank from social contacts” under her wing, and soon she’s having a friendly dinner with him, encouraging him to get out more and throw off the beaten mantle he wears. That’s a particular theme of the book, and Beth is always dishing out this sort of advice when she herself could use a big dose of her own medicine. To wit: Dr. Desmond Angrave, who has her heart turning somersaults from the book’s early pages, clearly has an interest in her that she cannot bring herself to see. Though he takes her to tea at the home of a dear elderly woman friend of his from his childhood, takes her to dinner and the theater and fishing, solicits her advice about gifts for an acquaintance, and regularly acknowledges that he’s looked up her work schedule to find out when she’s off, she’s convinced he’s in love with Frandora Nye, a beautiful young woman who is hospitalized with burns after a fire in a theater.

And that’s basically the plot. There’s more in the periphery as Frandora jerks around a number of men—she’s the beautiful, rich, and cruel type—and a loud, pretty, selfish male actor whom all the women—Beth herself included, briefly, until she spends time with him and realizes how shallow he is—are crushing on. There’s Christmas to plan for, and Beth’s misunderstanding that Desmond and Frandora are engaged—which a fall in the river followed by a two-day apparent coma quickly put to rights. While she’s out, she misses the Christmas concert where she’s supposed to play the harmonica for the children’s ward, but she’s engaged ten minutes after she wakes, so maybe that’s not such a bad trade-off.

The best thing about this book is its characters, most of whom are complex and interesting, and most of whom are saved by love in the end. The hero is not as strong as some—he has some nice quirks, like his deep interest in fishing, and he’s quite nice, but he seems to be about 15 years older than Beth, calls her “little Beth,” and early on refers to her as “this appealing child,” which gives me the creeps. He invites her to go fishing with him, but this means she sits on the bank for hours and watches him—as if fishing in itself weren’t dull enough! Furthermore, in another odd scene, after she invites him to “tell me about fishing,” he blathers on while Beth, completely inattentive, is hypocritically chastising herself for being a “good listener! That was all she was fit for! It was no use Mrs. Mackie trying to persuade her that beauty and glamour didn’t count, and that a man just wanted a good listener, a woman to consider him, make him comfortable.” Finally, nearly caught out in her inconsideration of him, she’s “alarmed in case the appropriate noises she had been making at intervals had been the wrong ones or in the wrong places.” This scene doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that their marriage will be an enduring success. At least Beth herself settles down as a nurse, starts to seem slightly less hopeless, and by the end of the book she “had stopped looking so drawn and anxious.” I waited with dread for the announcement at the end that she would be giving up nursing after marriage, but no such pronouncement is made on that point, though it would surprise me not at all if she did. So while overall this is a pleasant enough book, there’s not enough meat here to make it a satisfying meal.

Reluctant Nurse

By Anne Lorraine, ©1959

Nursing is a splendid career—but it must be chosen for the right reasons. A girl who is not suited to it, however hard she tries, might lead a more useful life elsewhere. That was Carol’s problem. Was she a born nurse? Should she return to dancing? Or would love and marriage provide a third way out?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“You look so lovely when you’re annoyed, darling!”

“That is the  beauty of this life—you can always be pretty sure that, whatever your problem is, hundreds of other people are going through the very same trouble.”

“Whenever Doctor Foreday visits our hospital, pet, half the nurses run temperatures!”

REVIEW:

Carol Lloyd is the daughter of a very successful doctor who is kind of an asshole. He’s always brushing Carol off for more important things, and he makes it plain that he prefers her younger brother Stephen, who is destined to become a doctor the minute he was born sporting a penis. Carol, then, becomes housemaid and secretary to the pair, and studies dancing. The opening chapter, she’s performing a dance she has created herself (she even wrote the music, which includes violins, talented gal), and she’s sure to finally convince her father that she needs to pursue a career in dancing—but an emergency calls the doctor and Stephen from the audience—and then they suffer a car crash en route to the hospital. Pulled from a café where she’s was just offered a chance to be a big star by Kevin Knight, a talent scout who’d been in the audience, she flies to the hospital and finds Stephen already dead and Dad on his way out. On his deathbed, he forces Carol to promise to carry on the family tradition and go into medicine.

Bizarrely, she decides to chuck her big chance at success as a dancer and go into nursing, even though she’s terrible at it and hates it. Far too many pages of indecision ensue—should she drop out of nursing? How could she break her promise? Did Dad always think she would make a great nurse, but never mentioned it until that fatal moment? Kevin keeps popping up to take her dancing and pressure her to quit nursing, and also to marry him, because “I’m in love with the real Carol—the girl who danced her way into my heart.” Through it all everyone is reminding her how bad she is as a nurse, and she’s always dropping kidney basins and breaking thermometers. So she decides that she’s going to drop out after exams and go back to dancing, which somehow satisfies her promise even if she passes the exams—which she does, apparently by the skin of her teeth.

Except now—you guessed it—she’s back to waffling again: “Surely, by proving that she could be a nurse, she had more or less committed herself to fulfil her promise to her father to its ultimate end?” Meanwhile, she’s become sort of a sounding board to Dr. Alan Foreday, who likes to talk out his medical cases with someone who can’t contribute at all to the conversation. When he’s not blathering on while Carol silently listens, he’s snapping sharply at her on the wards for all her terrible gaffes, like speaking to him. “To her shocked amazement he frowned at her, and his voice, when he spoke, was curt to the point of rudeness.” Miserably for her future patients, she’s decided to forge ahead with nursing and give up dancing forever when the man who was driving the car that smashed into her father’s is brought in, and he needs a brain surgery that’s only been attempted once—by Dr. Foreday—and he’d failed—and it was on a woman he was in love with—

Foreday is about to refuse to do the surgery when Carol overcomes her hatred of the man and begs him to try, and completely out of the blue Dr. Foreday tells her he loves her, though he has not heard her speak more than ten sentences, and most of those were, “Yes, Doctor.” She then suddenly recognizes that she loves Dr. Foreday: “Now, with the knowledge of Alan’s love for her, and hers for him, she knew she wanted only one thing from life … to be with Alan, and to do what pleased him!” After that horrible scene, Carol is even more committed to being a bad nurse. Until Alan tells her that he really wants her to go back to dancing, because apparently that’s really what her father wanted her to do all along, he just had never mentioned it and had been incredibly patronizing about her dancing to her face. Alan just wants her to be happy: “I want you to be yourself—because that’s how I love you.” Next thing you know, a major producer is on the line offering her a part that will make her a permanent show biz legend! Slow curtain, the end!

It’s a pity that I read this book immediately after I finished Make up Your Mind, Nurse, because they both have the same formula, and it’s not a good one: The nurse is being forced to do something she doesn’t want to do, but should she keep with it? It’s not interesting, it’s not suspenseful, it’s not enjoyable—it’s just irritating. Right from the opening pages I wanted to smack Carol Lloyd upside the head, and there are 192 in total to wade through. If Carol was reluctant to become a nurse, you should be more reluctant to read this book.

With Love from Dr. Lucien

By Pauline Ash, ©1966

The Bollington family had only one career in mind—medicine—and had all set their sights on the Axfrinton General Hospital. All except the youngest, Christine, whose life as a nurse was a nightmare from the start.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Every man has something different to offer, unless of course you loathe him.”

“Anyone who tells you that brothers like each other to use their private possessions—whether homes or merely pen-knives—well, they’re usually people who haven’t any brothers.”

“That’s a sure way of losing people’s regard, giving advice!”

“I am aware that most young nurses are underfed, but it isn’t a pretty performance when they set out to prove it. I’m old-fashioned enough to like my women to peck like little birds.”

“People said your heart broke and things like that, but, Christine told herself in mild astonishment, it wasn’t anywhere near the heart that real grief took you.”

REVIEW:

An essay by Bill Casey called “Nurse Novels” written in 1964 that I found recently—which though I have some criticism of I heartily recommend you read—puts forth a most interesting theory: You can predict which man the heroine will choose in the end based on his name, which in his limited research (20 books) is a one-syllable first name and a two-syllable last name. I’m finding the Casey Theory is interesting, but did not hold up for my sampling of 30, which yielded a 30% success rate: Just to start with the last three VNRNs, Roy Conliffe beat out Peter Noble in Nurse Lavinia’s Mistake, but Martin Graham and March Carrick-Carre both won in Tender Nurse and Nurse Willow’s Ward, respectively. In this book, however, we have a couple of noncompliant options, Kenan Bollington and Lucien Phayre—and the fact that Kenan is our heroine’s cousin disqualifies him not at all.

Outside of this anomaly, the book has other curiosities. Christine Bollington, who turns 18 in the first chapter, is being forced to go to nursing school because everyone in her family is wildly dedicated and successful doctor or nurse. The youngest in the family, and even called “Baby,” she doesn’t want them to know that she would rather be an artist: “They would be so disappointed, so ashamed that one of them shouldn’t want to follow in their footsteps.” Nursing school does, however, allow her to move out of her pink and white frilly bedroom—decorated thusly by her mother apparently to keep Christine forever a child—into the dormitory, which she greatly appreciates. But her lack of interest in nursing is topped by her lack of aptitude, her first attempt to make “invalid food” resulting in an “awful mess—too awful for it to be turned into something else by the resourceful staff nurse.” And there’s more: “Her efforts with inserting a hypo needle into the piece of pork provided from the kitchen had resulted in two broken needles, and Christine turning green.” Needless to say, she’s in competition for last place in her class until the other student is asked to consider a different occupation.

Her ace in the hole is Dr. Lucien Phayre, who is an old chum of her brother’s. They meet for the first time in the first chapter on the night of Christine’s birthday party, when she’s been dressed up by her older sister Almira as a stunning sophisticate—a major change from her usual role of the lace-capped, romper-clad child of the family. In her sister’s gown, she wows her cousin Kenan, on whom she has been maintaining a fierce crush for years, and who has never really noticed her before. But that evening, worried about her impending nursing career, she has slunk down to the kitchen to have a good wallow over a glass of warm milk in the wee hours when houseguest Lucien wanders in. She spills the truth to him, feeling more honest with him in that moment than she has been with anyone else to date, and he comforts her. Sister Almira, though, isn’t pleased by their friendship: “You just remember: he isn’t for you. Get me?” she warns, because “she had a difficult dictum for other people to accept in comfort: Almira believed in ‘what’s yours is mine and what’s mine’s my own.’” But as the fiasco that is Christine’s nursing training unfolds, Lucien plays the role of sympathetic friend, allowing her to always be her honest self, telling him about her disinterest in nursing, her fears of failure and disappointing her family. He takes her out for platonic dinners—though it’s not hard to guess his feelings run deeper—and helps her study. “If he found she kept forgetting something or not understanding the subject, he would go patiently over the ground from a different aspect, catching her interest by some little human story. Work with him was a joy.”

Meanwhile, having finally caught the eye of her cousin Kenan at the party, she dates him regularly, keeping his interest by playing the role of a jaded sophisticate, and letting him kiss her out of her wits. After one date, Christine staggers into the dorm to sign in. “She had never been in such a state of turmoil in her life. When Almira had come in from the garden, Christine had always known, from schoolgirl days, that her sister had just been kissed, but Almira had never looked shattered; only like a kitten replete with cream. A little cocky, satisfied for the moment, inclined to smile on everyone. But never like this. ‘Are you all right, my dear?’ Home Sister asked in kindly yet rather anxious tones, and she put up a hand to feel Christine’s forehead.” She’s falling hard, but also wondering if Kenan really cares for her or if he’s just playing with her to keep Almira jealous.

As she pushes on through the term, she starts to find her feet. Walking home from a dinner/study session with Lucien, they are pulled into an accident in which a woman has been crushed under a large piece of furniture. “Her head spun and she knew she hated this sort of job and always would, but she also discovered that she could force herself to do it and not think about it.” And, in the end, she is able to give the police a complete assessment of the situation when Dr. Lucien gives her “the chance to use her brains, to prove to herself that she wasn’t as useless at the job as she imagined, but merely overshadowed by her family.” When it’s all over, he’s rightfully proud: “You’ve a lot of hidden reserves that will rise to help you, in a sticky situation.”

It’s not hard to see where this book is going, but it’s a very pleasant and charming journey. Her dates with Kenan, once you get past the creepiness, are enjoyable for her witty conversation and sweet internal infatuation. She eventually does very well on her exams, after all her hours cramming with Dr. Lucien, which does not surprise. She’s still not sold on nursing as a career but is actually entertaining it as an option as the story winds down—though her ultimate decision is not revealed at book’s end. The characters are interesting and appealing, and the writing is delicious; you really feel Christine’s swoon for Kenan, and the growing relationship between her and Lucien. There’s not a whole lot to this book, and I’m not sure it technically counts as a nurse novel, but it’s a lovely, unique book with a delightful sense of humor, charm, and style.

Resort Nurse

By Rose Dana

(pseud. William E. Daniel Ross), ©1969

 

Nurse Carol Holly accepted her summer assignment to the Mic-Mac lodge with joy. It seemed full of promise. Her patient was wealthy Arthur Kulas, a stroke victim, a diabetic, but a fascinating art collector and lecturer still active in his career. And the Canadian resort offered the finest in entertainment and sports. Only Walter Pitt, the carefree young man who had pursued her from Boston, and Dr. Bill Shaw, the Mic-Mac’s resident physician, presented a problem; she liked both more than she cared to admit. Then Carol’s lightheartedness came to an abrupt end. Her patient was beaten, his room burglarized. By whom? By one or more of the too-fashionable guests at the lodge? But why? Harried by the mystery, Carol still dedicated herself to her nurse’s duties—until the criminals struck violently again, this time at her!

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Let’s admit, in spite of all the colleges, Boston is not the fun spot of the world for a single girl.”

 

“My last nurse had an unfortunate addiction to ginger ale. It was one of her more distressing aspects.”

 

“I hope you’re not given to making touching philosophic speeches like that. I couldn’t bear it.”

 

“Bart adores bullying me, and I find it so flattering.”

 

“Everybody acts idiotic at one time or another, but the people I have to deal with seem to make a career of it.”

 

“If Gabriel was blowing his horn and walls were tumbling all around us, you’d be running after me with a medicine bottle.”

 

“You are at your best in tennis clothes.”

 

“Don’t worry your pretty bullet-singed head.”

 

REVIEW:

This being a book by Dan Ross, you know it won’t be long before we meet a woman who will be referred to as “the dark girl” again and again. Enter Mimi Gamal, a Lebanese woman staying at the hotel in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, where stroke victim Arthur Kulas has gone to recuperate. “The name Gamal suggests she could be Turkish,” Arthur explains to Nurse Carol Holly, who he’s dragged along to tend to him on his trip. “But she’s too beautiful for a Turkish woman. More apt to be of mixed blood. They are always the loveliest women.”

 

In addition to being a racist, Arthur is a gloriously cranky Back Bay Bostonian (Beacon Street, to be precise), a former State Department envoy to Egypt, who puts on lectures about the Middle East illustrated with valuable exhibits from his personal art collection. He’s going to Canada to recover from the stroke that he’s showing no signs of; it’s his diabetes that gives him trouble, so Carol is there to administer insulin shots twice a day and urge him to eat on schedule. But that’s about the job entails, so this leaves her plenty of time to play tennis with various men at the resort.

 

One of her would-be boyfriends is Walter Pitt, a man she has encountered on the street outside Kulas’ house before they departed for Canada. He stops her with the story that he’s found a lost purse, but when she tells him it’s not hers, he chases her down the street for several blocks, insisting that he’s not “some sort of crazy person”—his persistence clearly proving otherwise—adding that her reluctance to engage in conversation with a stranger marks her as “unreasonable and Victorian,” saying, “Here we live in a swinging age, and you’re acting this way!” Naturally, when she meets him in Canada, she tells him, “I’m glad to see you again,” and takes him up on a game of tennis after he easily convinces her that his being there is a complete coincidence. Later she snubs him after he dances with Mimi Gamal, and her raging jealousy of Mimi keeps her sparring with him for the rest of the book, she all the long fervently insisting that she is not at all jealous! I hope for her sake that no one ever tries to sell this poor dope a bridge.

 

Her other beau is the local doctor, Bill Shaw. “You seem to attract young men,” Arthur notes drily. “I trust you’re not going to allow a biological urge to get you into trouble.” Given her gullibility, I don’t have much confidence in Carol’s ability to say no. Indeed, Bill soon convinces her to spend her afternoons at the understaffed hospital, since they need her help so much more than Arthur does. Curiously, though, for an overworked medico Bill has plenty of time for tennis with Carol. Bill doesn’t impress much as a doctor when he’s actually working, either; he treats a man for a mild heart attack, and decides, “But we won’t tell him that. No need to scare him.” Later, tending to an accident victim whose leg is clearly broken in several places and bleeding heavily, he chooses to first repair the facial lacerations before determining if the major arteries in the leg have been severed. If the kid bleeds out, at least he’ll look good in his coffin.

 

A number of people in the hotel profess a deep interest in Arthur’s artifacts, including Mimi, the hotel’s orchestra’s bass player and his wife, tourists Captain Bart and his wife Ellen Hooper, and sea Captain Tim Mullaney—who offers Holly a ride on the street which she accepts because she didn’t want “to give the impression she considered herself above riding in a truck.” It doesn’t take a genius to feel suspicious of their salivating enthusiasm for the valuables, but Carol is not the brightest bulb on the tree, so she drops what should be confidential information—particularly after an attempted burglary—at the slightest hint, including the fact that Arthur has brought a lot of his valuables with him on the trip. Even when she starts to have “the scary feeling that behind all this casual talk there was a pattern, an evil pattern,” she still tells them that the artifacts are kept in locked bags in the hotel suite but that Arthur will probably be taking them out to sort through them at some point. She’ll be lucky not to be charged as an accessory to the burglary that anyone but Carol can see coming a mile away.

 

Indeed, at the halfway point in the book, Arthur wakes up to find he has been robbed again, but only items of little value are taken. Carol wastes no time in publicizing this fact, along with the information that the cases just have light locks on them. It’s not surprising, then, that Arthur and Carol are soon held captive by four of the obvious suspects, who are after a treasure map they have assumed that Arthur not only owns—which he has already plausibly denied in private to Carol—but brought with him to Canada. The pair is rescued by Walter and Captain Tim, and the would-be crooks escape. Then two more invite Carol and Arthur on a cruise piloted by Captain Tim, with Walter crashing the party at the last minute. Miles out at sea, one of the party pulls a gun and insists that Arthur “hand over” the treasure map—now the assumption is not only that he brought the map on vacation but that he carries it with him everywhere he goes.

 

Suddenly the plot takes on the velocity of a tornado: In four paragraphs the criminals have been apprehended and investigated, and Arthur and Carol have checked out of the hotel. Now all that remains is for the treasure map to be found and Carol to decide who to marry. Four pages later that has been accomplished, too, and with the nauseating final sentence, we can be shut of this stupid book.

 

If there is one thing I cannot stand, it’s a stupid heroine. The only enjoyable feature of this book is the witticisms that Arthur tosses off with marvelous frequency, but unless you have the ability to enjoy a dumb book, it may not be enough to compensate for an insultingly flawed story line and a moronic main character.

Emergency Nurse

By Anne Lorraine, ©1955
Cover illustration by Jack Harman

Love and a career, ambition and security, often pull in different directions, and it is not easy for the young to sort out their claims. It was particularly difficult for Nurse Gina Delham, haunted as she was by the thought of her parents’ unhappy marriage. How was she to choose between the different paths set before her?

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Nothing is more infectious than highly strung nerves, you know, and I want you to be a rock to your patients, not a nettle. Let them rest on you, rely upon you—and take good care they never get stung, either by your tongue or your brisk efficiency!”

 

“She’s a woman. Surely you can’t expect her to view mangled bodies with no more emotion than she would inspect a squashed insect? All women are highly strung, emotional is the word you use, I think.”

 

“Bless you, Gina. You’ve given me something to look forward to at last. Life has been pretty ghastly all round. But on Wednesday at seven-thirty life will begin again in all its old glory! We’ll have fun, my sweet—I’ll bring the chariot to the hospital gates, and mind you have shoes that fit well, for you won’t be home by midnight, and we don’t want any glass slippers left on the highway!”

 

REVIEW:

Gina Delham is our eponymous nurse working in the English version of the ED, the Casualty Department, which is headed by the aloof Dr. Simon Brayford. She’s been told by the Matron early on that she’s not a career nurse: “Like most girls, if the offer of marriage came along, and was sufficiently tempting, you would have no more hesitation in throwing over this work than a child offered a cream bun would hesitate to throw away a slice of bread and butter.” Gina wants desperately to be serious about her career, but she’s afraid that the Matron is right. Her heart throbs for Simon Brayford, but it’s a lost cause—or so she thinks—because “nurses are, to him, just so much necessary hospital equipment, about as absorbing as a jar of swabs, and not nearly as useful!”

 

But in spite of her professed admiration for the doctor, she can’t possibly tumble for him because he’s poor and driven and hopelessly devoted to his work, and her parents—you guessed it, killed in a car accident when she was younger—had been driven to hate each other, and the children that bound them together, by the deep poverty they could never escape. So she’s going to marry a rich man, like this here patient, Garrick Peters, who will lift her and her two younger siblings into the good life. Garrick, recovering from a serious car accident and instantly smitten with Gina, seems ready to oblige—a dozen roses with an unsigned card arrive at her door—and Gina is so confident of her future as Mrs. Garrick Peters that she snubs an unprecedented date with Simon. But at his discharge, Garrick is heard telling a woman who turns out to be his fiancée, the duplicitous cad, that he’ll be glad to leave his beautiful blonde nurse behind, saying “The poor kid is making a bit of a nuisance of herself.” Then it’s all over the hospital, her “humiliation, searing, soul-destroying,” that “she had loved him,” she of the frigid, money-grubbing heart.

 

But on the upside, now she’s free to take up an offer by Simon, who despite her disinterest in him, still wants her to be the chief nurse of the new Casualty Department he’s creating at Barneford Hospital. And she’s still free to continue her paradoxical crush on Simon: “If only the doctor would admit that she had some other use than as a competent ‘mate’ on the job!” she sighs. She seems to vacillate wildly in her points of view, one day wishing madly that Simon would notice her, then insisting tearfully that as God as her witness, she’ll never be hungry again! Mostly, to the reader’s growing boredom, the latter. There are, of course, the usual vague hints that Simon does have feelings for Gina, to which she, as a dense VNRN heroine, is completely oblivious.

 

Then, while out on an almost-date with Simon—coffee after an ambulance run—they bump into Garrick, who tells Gina that he loved her all along. Yippee! Except that Simon then tells her that he loves her too, and wants her to stay with him. “She must be strong now. […] No foolish heart must be allowed to persuade her to throw aside all her resolutions.” Simon, citing the growing success of Casualty, hires a young nurse he knew years ago, in a past that he never discusses (though she bites Gina’s head off when she says that with hands like his, he surely must have done some surgery at some point). Betty Newent is the most scatterbrained nurse ever, always dropping trays of pills and going to pieces when an accident victim is brought in—not the most logical choice for an ED nurse, but she and Simon are determined to whip her into a successful nurse, with Gina assisting at the lash. Gina, of course, instantly jumps to the conclusion that this is because Simon and Betty are planning to marry, though Betty seems mostly afraid of Simon and he seems mostly worried about her. With this leap of poor logic, Gina realizes that she herself is in love with Simon, and never did love Garrick. But she still can’t go quietly into that good heartbreak: “Simon represented everything against which she had turned herself, years before. He was everything that her husband must never be—a poor man, offering insecurity and constant striving.” It’s maddening, I tell you!

 

She’s going to soothe her aching heart with a heavy work schedule. “It’s the only way to forget things that have to be forgotten,” a maxim that she shares with both Simon and Betty, though it’s not clear to Gina why, if Simon and Betty are soon to be united in wedded bliss, they should both be so darned mopey. Then Garrick proposes and Gina accepts, even though they have a frank chat about the fact that she doesn’t love him. Simon makes a proposal of his own, that Gina come with him when he leaves Barneford Hospital to start a clinic back where he comes from. She responds by freaking out, yet again: “I’ve been afraid of poverty because of what it can do to people—and if I can’t have my family with me now, do you think I’d consider, for one moment, a job where I still could not have them with me? I want a real life, with security, and freedom, and fun—” So, curiously, when Garrick insists that Gina quit her job after they are married so she can better attend his frivolous and boring cocktail parties where, “hour after hour, the talk was only of frothy trivialities,” she tells Garrick that she will not give up her work.

 

That fight is tabled for the time being, as they are en route to see Gina’s younger brother and sister and gladden their hearts with promises of college and riding lessons. But lo, Alan doesn’t want to go to college and has arranged a position for himself at the local garage, and little Jennifer is working at the horse barns in exchange for riding lessons, so they’re all set, thank you very much. Then, as the final straw, Aunt Katie, who has raised the little Delhams, tells Gina that her parents really did love each other madly, and those fights that Gina overheard were just words of the moment: “They fought like cat and dog at times, but it was all good fun,” Katie tells her—ha, ha. It turns out that Katie, who had been in love with Gina’s father, had fostered the idea in Gina’s mind that her parents didn’t love their children or each other as a sort of nasty revenge. Katie has to tell Gina the truth now because Gina is marrying a man she doesn’t love, and Katie wants Gina to have the kind of love her parents had for each other. Curiously, Gina responds to this shocking revelation by flinging herself into Aunt Katie’s arms and having a good cry. I myself would have, at the very least, slapped Katie silly, but I’m funny about that sort of treachery.

 

So Gina decides she can’t marry Garrick after all. “He offered her fun as another man might offer her eternal devotion, and fun wasn’t enough for her. She wanted so much more from life; she would welcome hard work, idealism, sacrifice—anything which life with a man such as Simon might demand, which life with Simon must demand.” She is so dazed by this realization that she wanders as if senseless through town—which she tends to do after a crisis, such as when she overheard Garrick talking to his then-fiancée—and is run over by a bicyclist. Like any good nurse, she shrugs off the headache that becomes increasingly ferocious over the next few days. When she’s finally felled by the pain and the story of the accident comes out, she’s sent for tests and discovered to have a large clot on her brain, and only the most promising brain surgeon can help her—three guesses as to who this turns out to be!

 

As she’s lying in the hospital, she learns the truth of Simon’s past: He and Betty were engaged once, but she dumped him for his best friend, and then on their honeymoon the pair were in a car accident, and the groom injured and brought to Simon. But the young man died despite Simon’s best efforts, and Simon was obliged to flee the gossip that followed him, suggesting that he had deliberately allowed the man to die. Now he’s just trying to help Betty get back on her feet and get over her dead husband; the two feel only friendship for each other. Gina, seeing her clot as a golden opportunity for the man she loves, refuses to have anyone else do the surgery. Does she die on the table? Does Simon feel he can resume his brilliant career as a brain surgeon? Does Gina agree to marry Simon in the end? What do you think?

 

This book is a bit of a mess, with a lot of dead ends. The identity of the man who sent the roses—you can’t help but suspect that it was Simon, not Garrick as Gina assumed—is never revealed. Simon notes in passing that he has two adopted children who are “parked”—his word—with his sister, and whom he has never mentioned or visited in the months that make up the story. He says he loves these children, and loved their parents, who are now deceased, but this is all we ever find out about them. Several times Gina is accused as being overly demanding, and we are treated to a flashback in which her mother tells her, “You are so greedy, my dear—you make more demands on those you love than they can ever hope to meet.” Later on, a minor nurse character also tells Gina, “You demand so much of people that you scare them away from you.” But we have no evidence of this at all; rather, the opposite is true: Gina has a tendency to be so closed up that she suffers from not knowing what she herself wants, let alone making demands of others. So what’s that supposed to be about?

 

The endless waffling on Gina’s part about whether she should feel hurt that Simon doesn’t love her or pursue Garrick for his money becomes more than a little frustrating. Also, pretty much everyone in the book—Simon, Betty, Gina, Garrick, and even minor characters like the Matron and the hospital librarian—have secret pasts or past secrets that they allude to constantly, and usually tearfully, while refusing to discuss them outright. “Do we have to talk in riddles all the time?” Garrick asks Gina at one point (after she’s learned the truth about her parents’ relationship but is clearly not going to share this with her betrothed, just mawkishly presses their love letters to her cheek). It’s a really excellent question. This book would have been a whole lot shorter than 191 pages if anyone could have just had an honest conversation. And I might have liked it a bit better, and had more respect for Gina. As it happens, the only enjoyable character in the book is Garrick, who regularly drops foppish remarks like, “I’m Garrick Peters, remember? Your very dearest, most precious patient—who fell in love with you when in a state of deep unconsciousness on a marble slab.” But unfortunately, he doesn’t pop up enough to make the book worth the time, and none of the remaining characters are so attractive or interesting that you should spend an afternoon reading about them.