White Cap of Courage

By Ann Rush
(pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham), ©1960

When Nurse Sally Camlin learned that politicians threated to close the doors of Memorial Hospital, she knew she had to fight. The big, old hospital was the only source of medical aid for the surrounding slums. Sally’s only ally was young Dr. Peter Adamson. But he was a rough, aloof young man who came from the slums himself. He was known to consort with the biggest wheels in the powerful vice syndicate, who were hand-in-glove with the politicians. Sally threw her career, her reputation, her very life, into this fight. Would she win?

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:

“You can always get a rise out of a housekeeper if you say she doesn’t work hard, but she’ll belittle it herself if given half a chance. Ask a woman patient what she does and she’ll tell you, ‘Just a housewife,’ as if it weren’t the most important thing any woman can be.”

 “She’s much too pretty to be rich.”

“I’m specializing in the bedside manner, dear.”

“Nursing’s no job for a gently raised girl.”

“Lalla had always been a predatory female to whom a  man who was another woman’s property was worth twice what that man might have been roving free.”

REVIEWS:

There’s a lot of excitement at shabby old Memorial Hospital as Chapter One opens. Nurse Sally Camlin is working the night shift in the Emergency Department when her friend Nurse Janet tells her that the hospital board is planning to close the scrappy establishment. Then a gunshot victim is wheeled in, and Dr. Peter Adamson is called to staff the case. “She could not like the young doctor,” who goes around with a defensive scowl on his face and never says hello. But he has a tragic past, with a drunk father and a mother killed when he was five, and he grew up in the town’s slum, the quaintly named Shacktown, so he’s had to work hard to put himself through school. “He’s been too busy to learn how to make friends,” admonishes the kindly chief of staff Dr. McLeod, Sally’s longtime family friend and Dr Adamson’s medical mentor. “Pete Adamson’s a fine boy. And a good doctor.” And when Dr. Adamson takes the shooting victim to surgery, Sally helps out as scrub and learns that the doctor knows this hoodlum, but also cares about him, and Dr. Pete even compliments her for her work on the case. So—and this should come as little surprise—Sally is soon asking Dr. Peter to come sit with her and her friends at lunch.

She has a fiancé, of course, Dr. Bob Quenton, who is relentlessly pursuing an established surgeon at the swanky hospital across town, hoping for a cushy job where he works three days and golfs two, but somehow this unfortunately means also pursuing the doctor’s beautiful and sneaky daughter Lalla. So Bob spends a lot of time out on dates with Lalla, with or without her father, in the name of chasing the lifestyle—one that the hard-working and dedicated Sally doesn’t approve of at all. That’s Classic VNRN Trope #2, for those of you keeping scores at home.

As the hospital heads toward shutdown, Sally enlists Pete and a number of her more dedicated hospital pals (Dr. Bob not being among them) to start a campaign to keep the hospital afloat. In the meantime, she’s often working alone in the ED, which is a most happening spot at 2:00 am, very popular with the local gangsters, who turn up with such regularity that one wonders why the hospital hasn’t hired a guard. Tony Amando, the mob boss, drops in with his lovely daughter Maria, who’s swallowed a bottle of sleeping pills after finally figuring out what dear old dad does for a living, and a few days later Tony’s thugs, the adorably named Spud and Vin, wander in to threaten Sally in order to extract information about how the young gunshot vicitim is recovering from his wounds. Sally helpfully tells them everything they want to know, including the room where Nick is parked, so they can just nip up and collect his weakened body and haul it back to their shack in the woods, taking Sally along with them, since she could ID them to the cops.

Pete also ends up at the shack, on the business end of a pistol belonging to another mobster named Abalone (tee hee!), and the anxiety of the situation causes them to fall into each other’s arms. Surprisingly, in the big showdown scene at the end, Sally actually winds up taking a slug in the gut, which is apparently cured not with immediate surgery but lots of bandage changes and three weeks in the hospital. It’s a stupid mistake, one that is easy to research, but it’s honestly about my only beef with this book. In the closing pages, when Sally breaks up with Dr. Bob, he’s outraged that she wants to keep working: “In other words, your work is more important to you than I am.” She sensibly responds, “No matter how much I loved the man I married, I’d have to go on being myself, not just a shadow of him.” Pete, on the other hand, is thrilled to find that Sally has a house of her own to offer him, not to mention her deceased doctor father’s completely stocked home office, and that she wants to keep working at the (saved, of course) hospital “until you get on your feet.”

Sally is always a strong and forthright character who calls it hypocrisy when she sees it. Early on, she tells Bob she doesn’t understand why they have to wait to get married—although this device conveniently allows the heroine sufficient time to come to her senses and realize that her betrothed is an ass. “I wanted us to be married, wanted to help with your expenses at graduate school next year so that we could be together. That’s a wife’s privilege, Bob—to help wherever she’s needed. You’re too proud to accept things from me, but jump to Dr. Roberts’ whistle because he can help. I can’t understand it.” (Bob pulls out all the stops with chauvinism and irrationality when he says, “It’s a matter of masculine pride. I don’t want to feel obligated to the woman I love.” He should feel obligated every time she walks in the door.)

The writing here is of that peaceful, fat style of early VNRNs, where the camaraderie of the hospital staff is tangible and the characters feel honest and true. It’s not laughably campy, but the kidnapped-by-gangsters plot line is certainly delightful (and not altogether uncommon; see also Emergency Room Nurse and Society Nurse). If Pete starts out the book with more than a whiff of Asperger’s (“‘Kerosene and—’ Peter began, then broke into a grin. ‘You’re joking. For a minute—’”), and his Darcy-like transformation isn’t completely convincing, he is a compassionate and competent character that we can appreciate for his respect for his bride-to-be. Interestingly, the other VNRN of Ann Rush’s that I’ve read (Eve Cameron, M.D.) gave us a woman who was a doctor, but much more of a spineless loser than Nurse Sally. Ms. Rush has penned at least three more nurse novels (one of which is enticingly subtitled Passion at the County Hospital!), and I look forward to discovering if her next books give us more stalwart characters like Sally or just stale pushovers like Eve.

Ivy Anders Night Nurse

By Helen B. Castle 

(pseud. Frank Castle), ©1963

Three men wanted Nurse Ivy Anders. Dr. Paul Farrow wanted her to be his mistress. Detective Dick Rudd wanted her to marry him. And patient Sebastian Cruz wanted to disfigure he beautiful body beyond recognition. Here is the thrilling story of a lovely young nurse and the passions which threatened to destroy her—revenge, jealousy, love, and her own unshakable dedication to the noble profession of healing.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“It is a rough, lonely business to stand over someone with steel in your hand, knowing you must try to play God, knowing how inadequate you really are.”

“So who needs dates? It’s a pretty ridiculous routine, really, the whole business of working at being vivacious, companionable, and terribly interested in the details of some man’s job, when he is usually thinking only of setting up an opportunity to neck, a poor word to describe what he actually has in mind.”

“Men were interested in pretty, decorative women, not those who displayed some intelligence and ambition.”

“Sometimes I think a surgical gown is the most efficient man-trap ever devised, though there is a good deal to be said for a nurse’s uniform, too, at least where doctors are concerned.”

“I’m all for any woman who can get a man to an altar. It is a knack that I certainly never acquired!”

“Maybe this was what is in store for her, Ivy thought wryly, to grow old in a nurse’s uniform. Maybe she ought to get a cat. Old maids and cats seemed to go together.”

“See that he marries you—and no more foolishness about running around with a street gang!”

REVIEW:
Ivy Anders works the night shift at St. Vibiana’s Hospital, located somewhere near Atlanta. At 26, she is starting to seriously sweat the fact that she’s not married. Working the night shift makes dating difficult, and she’s very devoted to her job. But suddenly, it’s raining men: Detective Sergeant Dick Rudd, coming to the hospital after visiting hours to visit a family member, slips and puts his arm through a window and is promptly sutured closed and admitted to Ivy’s ward. Dr. Stan Dykestra, about to conclude his residency, is asking her to have coffee with him in the cafeteria. And Dr. Paul Farrow starts hanging around the nurse’s station to talk to Ivy about how his wife doesn’t understand him and how lonely he is. Yes, a married man!!

Things begin to look up for Ivy when Dick asks her out on a date and promptly proposes. She says she’ll think about it, because “as for getting to know Dick Rudd, Ivy remembered a thought offered by her sister Benita on one occasion, ‘You tell yourself you know a man, marry him, then discover he isn’t quite the person you thought he was, at all.’ If this was true, why bother to wait—?” A match made in heaven. Dick’s talking about the honeymoon in Hawaii when he drops the deal-breaker: “You won’t be doing any more nursing. My wife isn’t going to work!” When Ivy points out that she spent more time training to be a nurse than he did to become a cop and asks him if he could quit his job, he says it’s not the same thing because he’s a man. “A man’s duty is to make a living, a woman’s duty is to make a home, and to take care of the kids.” So that’s the end of that. “She was not going to throw it all over simply because this man high-handedly demanded that she do so!”

But then Stan is looking at her as though Ivy was “very much in his thoughts.” She tries to find opportunities for them to be alone together so he can pop the question. Eventually he asks her—not exactly to marry him, but to “go with me when I leave.” She will, and now her days are full of “making many plans and of getting acquainted, of attempting in a hurry to learn a man’s ways, his likes and dislikes, an interesting but frequently perplexing business.” Yet she has a “sense of some indefinable obstacle between them.” Sure enough, the day Stan ends his residency, he disappears, and sends her a postcard from his hometown in Idaho. He shows up at the hospital a week later with a woman on his arm. He introduces her to Ivy as his wife, whom he married four years ago, a week before he started his residency. He hasn’t seen her in all these years, and he’d gone home to divorce her—but he couldn’t. “It is an obligation I must carry,” he tells her, adding that he also has an obligation to a church group that financed his medical education to go to Burma to run a clinic there for seven years, and he and his wife are leaving next week.

It’s a close call for Ivy, but now all that’s left for her is Dr. Farrow. Either him or she becomes one of those “staff nurses, unwed, middle-aged or older, who were inclined to be fussy, short-tempered, the objects of amusement. They were women who had turned inward on themselves, who had reached the point where their world had narrowed down to the hospital and a lonely apartment or a room at the nursing home, nothing else.” So when Dr. Farrow asks her to dinner, she accepts. He kisses her goodnight, then “sudden forceful insistence, an attempt to go farther which Ivy found difficult to handle.” But she can’t stop seeing him. “Perhaps, she thought, what Paul was offering her was all she was ever going to get, life in a man’s shadow, but that the half-loaf of an affair with him might be more desirable than nothing at all.”

Part of what is driving Ivy is her fear, never expressly stated, of dying a virgin. One of her patients, an 18-year-old girl named Jill, is sleeping with Sebastian Cruz, the head of a gang called the Toros. Jill is brought in when she and her boyfriend are attacked by the rival gang, and Ivy is tucking Jill in for the night when the girl pulls up her nightgown and shows Ivy her naked body. “I’ve got a real classy shape, huh?” she says. “I bet you don’t even know what it means to be a woman. Well, I do! I’m Sibby’s woman, all the way. When we get together, it’s thunder and lightning, we really blow up a storm! Like, there’s no tomorrow, and what’s the use waiting—?” Jill isn’t the only unmarried woman getting some action; Ivy catches another single nurse wearing nothing but a slip in a hospital room with a man. “A perverse imp—or her other self—seemed to whisper that she might be missing something desirable that life had to offer, and perhaps should begin to find out for sure before it was too late.” So Ivy mulls over Paul’s offer to become his mistress. “She would know what it meant fully to be a woman. Jill’s scornfully derisive charge that she did not know still rankled in her.”

Fortunately for her, Ivy never has to make up her mind about what to do. She tracks down the gang leader, who is suffering from stab wounds, and en route to the hospital is stopped by the rival gang and injured in the battle that ensues before Dick Rudd runs them all off and literally carries Ivy, whose uniform has been ripped down the front, to the hospital. When Ivy comes to, after demonstrating why healthcare professionals make such lousy patients, she worries only that her hair has been shaved off, she isn’t wearing any makeup, and Dick saw her exposed body. At the end of the book, when one of her suitors shows up and Ivy is safely engaged, one of the floor nurses gives Ivy “a look which contained many things—congratulations, admiration, envy, plus a whole-hearted sharing of this moment which only a woman could savor, the moment when the puzzling, exasperating and often torturing business of being a female at last had meaning and purpose.”

This book, more than most VNRNs, clearly paints the difficult corner that women of Ivy’s generation were in. She might have a satisfying, meaningful career, but she’s expected to toss it away without a second thought the minute she gets engaged, because it’s not a career that gives her life real value in the world but a husband (and, by inference, a sex life). But marriage is a tricky business. The husband in question, fashioned out of a near stranger, is beguiled or even fooled into marriage, and her career—possibly her happiness as well—are sacrificed at the altar for this “greater” good. I appreciated the book’s ending, which does not force Ivy to give up her work, but I’m not convinced that Ivy, once married, is going to be all that happy. I had been looking forward to this book after enjoying Helen Castle’s Emergency Ward Nurse, and Ivy Anders doesn’t disappoint. It’s not exactly a classic VNRN, but this book stands out because it is the most clear-eyed—not to mention risqué—example of the genre I have met to date.

Society Nurse

By Jean Carew (pseud. of Jane Corby), ©1963
Cover illustration by Robert Maguire

Doctor’s orders! Give up her fun-filled life as the most prominent debutante in town. Devote herself to helping the poor and the sick. Return Ed Talbot’s ring and forget her glamorous future as his wife. It was strong medicine. But Josette knew she must do it if she wanted Doctor Gregory Fielding’s respect. Yet, why was his approval so important to her?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Listen to your mother when she asks you to lead the debutante parade with your hair its natural color.”

“He was prouder of being one of the nation’s foremost stamp collectors than he was of his financial reputation.”

“There was something about the dignity and tradition of being presented to the social leaders of Clarkesville that marked an important turning point in a young girl’s life.”

“It would be a brave germ that would dare to bite Mrs. Talbot without the august lady’s express permission.”

“Test tubes and research equipment and new medicines were so exciting to the doctors of the present generation.”

“It is quite obvious my dear, that you are not married to a doctor. If you were, you would know that the climate of discovery that a doctor’s wife lives in is confined almost solely to finding lost shirts studs or making sure that your husband’s tuxedo is ready when he dashes in five minutes before he is going somewhere to make a speech.”

“Don’t underestimate the fury of a stuffed shirt.”

“Okay, miss—make with the aspirins.”

REVIEW:
Cover lines don’t get much better than this: “She rated tops in the Social Register but how did she rate as a woman?” For a moment I wondered if this book was published by Ace, which is the undisputed master of the cover lines. Social Register queen Josette DeCourcy—JoJo to her friends—is the outgoing number one debutante of the previous year. She’s engaged to Edward Stanley Talbot, an attorney and rising diplomatic star who is counting on her to play an essential role in life: “As my wife you will be internationally famous as a hostess,” he tells her.

Then, on their way home from the debutante ball at 3 a.m., they run over an old derelict and badly injure him. Ed rises to the occasion and insists they drive their victim to a private hospital even though it’s farther away, because “it was bad enough for him to have been driving when the accident occurred … Once the papers got hold of that fact, they’d really make the most of it. But at the Pavilion the staff could be trusted to say nothing for publication.” He is relieved when JoJo suggests they say she had been driving, and at the hospital he carries on about conspiracies of gangsters who push old men in front of cars, frame the drivers if they are important persons like him, and then cash in on insurance policies taken out against the derelicts. JoJo can’t help but think poorly of his chivalry. For her part, she spends the rest of the evening wishing she could do more to help the old man, Jim Norton, and noticing how poorly everyone treats him—everyone, that is, except Dr. Gregory Fielding. Dr. Fielding is more than a little scornful of JoJo, telling her that the sympathy of a debutante is short-lived: “You’ll have your butler bring around a basket of fruit and that will be the end of it.”

But JoJo is made of sterner stuff, and the next morning she calls up her Aunt Liza Devery in Chicago, who has used her money to establish a settlement house for the poor, and tells her that she wants to become a practical nurse. Liza has just started a nursing class, and offers JoJo a suite in her house for the three months the class will take, and JoJo hops the next plane. Classes aren’t easy, because in addition to wearing unattractive dresses, low-heeled shoes and serviceable stockings, “there was still more she had to do to submerge her glamorous personality,” namely stopping the limo two blocks from the settlement house and walking the rest of the way. Also, she has to learn to make a bed.

Ed has had to go to Washington for a while, and JoJo hasn’t mentioned the fact that she is taking this class to him, since “he was as determined as ever to dictate her every action,” and he is dead set against it. When Dr. Fielding shows up in Chicago for a conference, he asks JoJo to go with him to the last night’s banquet. When they get home at 3 a.m., there’s Ed on Liza’s doorstep, furious at JoJo’s deception and her seeing Dr. Fielding, which he blows up into a huge conspiracy, opining that they’ve been carrying on an affair since the night she ran over Jim Norton—he now seems to think this is how it really happened. She has mixed feelings about Ed, between her guilt over having hidden the truth from him and how he treats her like “a child or a moron,” “belittling her earnest effort to become a community asset.”

Her course over, she returns home and takes a job as a nurse’s aide, and plans her wedding to Ed, which will put an end to her nursing dreams, because once she’s married, “I’ll have to stay in my own house,” she says, as if she is speaking of a prison. She’s seeing Dr. Fielding daily at the hospital, as well as Jim Norton, who is recovering from hip surgery. Then a gaggle of gangsters shows up and kidnaps her and Jim—apparently Ed’s theories about gangsters and insurance is not as half-baked as it seemed at the time—and JoJo saves the day by nursing one of the mobsters, who has a bad cold, and offering to pay them $800 if they’ll leave Jim alone. She’s assisted in her mission by Ed, who goes on the radio to announce that she is missing, denouncing her work as a nurse’s aide and saying that she probably had a date she forgot to mention. “If that Talbot guy is the one you’re going to marry, I’m sorry for you, kid,” says gangster Googie. “He’s a jerk if I ever heard one.” With Googie’s disapprobation in her pocket, she finally has the strength to realize that Ed is not her best option.

This is an entertaining book, though not really exciting. What there is of it is pleasant enough, but there’s just not much to it. I am a complete sucker for glamour and high fashion, and I wish there had been more of the “Paris designed suit, silver mink stole and saucy feathered hat,” stuff I can really sink my teeth into. There’s a fair amount of the debutante life, but this just comes across as silly—indeed, I think we are supposed to see it that way, as JoJo herself increasingly rejects it for a more useful life in nursing. JoJo is never actually more than a nurse’s aide, and it’s not clear if she’s planning to continue working or further her studies in nursing, so it’s a tiny stretch to call this a nurse romance. But it does have its charms, and is a worthwhile companion for the few hours it takes to whip through it.

Emergency Room Nurse

By Claire Vincent (pseud. of Miriam Lynch), ©1963

Nurse Pat Estabrook’s destiny was changed the night two strange and mysterious men were brought into the Emergency Room of Hanson General Hospital. Handsome Detective Timothy Wall was called in to investigate the man who gave his name as “John Doe” in the hopes that he would be the important clue in solving a four-year-old robbery … Rod Wuerth, the disciplined chief resident of the Psychiatric Ward, became involved with the other man, a hit-and-run victim who seemed to be suffering from delusions … And, when the case was solved, Pat knew there was no mystery as to the man she really loved …

GRADE: B

REVIEW:
More of a mystery story than a romance, Emergency Room Nurse has a little more pull than most nurse romance novels. Pat Estabrook is—you guessed it—an emergency room nurse, with a huge crush on the “black Irish, hard-bitten” detective, whose name is, incongruously, Timmy. (She herself is called Claire a couple of times, apparently the character’s original name in the days before Find and Replace.) When Timmy gets a call from Pat that an Italian man who refuses to give his name has been stabbed in the gut, he is immediately convinced that the man is connected to the robbery of the Baylor Armored Car garage four years ago. “John Doe” is carrying no ID, an expensive linen hanky, and a huge wad of bank notes, and he talk-a like thees: “You let-a me out of here! Don’t want no cops. I’m gettin’ outa here now!” But with Pat on duty he has no chance of that, and after she gives him 100 mg of Demerol and some scopolamine, he is wheeled off to surgery.

With that crisis resolved, Pat turns her attention to another patient, who is the victim of a hit and run. This patient is slightly demented and also cagey about his identity, and “Mr. Thompson” keeps claiming that “my life is in danger, that’s how it is.” But he reminds Pat of her father, so she goes to visit him in the psych ward the next day and crosses paths with Dr. Rod Wuerth, the chief resident there. Pat doesn’t care for psychiatry, or for Dr. Wuerth. “He was never seen in Chung Lee’s or the Korner Koffee Shop … Pat dismissed him from her mind with the tag ‘odd ball.’ ” Nonetheless, begins to warm to him and accepts a date.

Meanwhile, Pat’s protégée, Bonnie, is a “fuzzy-brained, reckless” student nurse who hankers for pediatric intern Frank Cheney. Frank has a lot of money but is close-mouthed and secretive, and when Pat catches him slipping in to see the Italian patient, she wonders, “Why the furtiveness, his obvious disinclination to be seen?” Dr. Cheney and Mr. Doe both have a lot of money, Pat realizes, so she assumes that the good doctor is also involved in the holdup, but she keeps her silence out of her unswerving and unfathomable devotion to the slacker Bonnie.

As she leaves work, Pat is struck on the head and admitted to the hospital (remember, it’s 1963). Timmy grills her: “What is it that would make you dangerous to whoever gave you that bash on the head?” All she can think of is that she has seen Dr. Cheney visiting the Italian patient, but she still holds her tongue.

Then Bonnie, who has blown off her shift, borrows Pat’s coat. After she’s gone, Pat suddenly realizes that whoever attacked her might now attack Bonnie, thinking she is Pat. So she cabs it down to the seedy waterfront to look for Bonnie and arbitrarily wanders into the Rosetta Manuccini Settlement House, a new development built to help the poor slobs. Chatting up the woman at the front desk, Pat learns that Mr. Manuccini is a big gangster called Louie the Man, and he’s supposed to live a few blocks away, but no one has ever seen him, isn’t that strange? And Rosetta’s portrait seems somehow familiar to Pat … Manuccini? Cheney? Hmmm.

But this incredibly contrived revelation only wraps up half the mysteries. So on her way home, Pat is kidnapped by a “thick-necked” guy and his chum and forced to get them into the hospital to see Mr. Thompson, who actually is involved in the bank robbery. On the psych floor the trio runs into Rod, and Pat “stood there sick with terror because a gun had been pointed at him and she feared his life was in danger.” Not to worry, though, it all turns out well enough: They are rescued by the mental patients, Frank’s dad is proved innocent of all wrongdoing, Pat turns down a date with Timmy, and Frank and Bonnie tear off for a hasty wedding, which puts the kibosh on Bonnie’s career as an assassin cum nurse and thus saves many lives. Ron drives Pat home. Slow curtain, the end.

It’s a lively enough book, a decent read. The writing is good, even if a few of the plot devices are more than a little forced, and the final paragraphs are satisfying. When you put this book down, you feel you have not wasted your time, not an overly common feeling with this genre. If you have a couple of hours on a breezy porch this summer, this is a worthwhile companion.