Border Nurse

By Dorothy Dowdell, ©1963 

Jeanne Reynolds was troubled over the events of the past few days. She had been following the explicit instructions of the owners of the Desert Valley Growers’ clinic. Then what did the warning from Merritt Williams mean? “I’m afraid you’re going to be hurt,” he had said last night as they stood at her door. “I find you enchanting, Miss Head Nurse of the Growers’ Clinic. But I’m afraid that one of my cleverest plans is going to boomerang on me.” He had kissed her then. The morning headlines made clear his meaning. Jeanne realized then that her heart had mistaken a foe for a friend.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“I’d rather be glamorous than nice.” 

“When I grow up, I’m going to buy a Geiger counter and hunt for uranium.” 

“Think about me sometimes while you’re strapping a sprained ankle or giving a shot.”

“I’m quite dangerous with a hypo when I think of some of the exasperating things you do and say.”

“She’d better get busy! She’s twenty-four. She’ll be an old maid if she doesn’t look out!”

“We’re going to get married no matter what happened, but it will be lots nicer to be solvent.”

REVIEW:
Jeanne Reynolds has left her job in Los Angeles to work run the clinic for Mexican migrant workers under the auspices of the Growers’ Association of Desert Valley, California, largely because she is fluent in Spanish (her father grew up in the Panama Canal Zone, as his father had been a government employee there, and spoke the language at home). You’d think, though, that poor Jeanne has a hex on her for all the trouble that brews up. First, a hot young lawyer named Merritt Williams who is working to unionize the native-born American migrant farm workers shows up at her clinic with an injured American worker. She is unable to treat the man, though, because this clinic is set up exclusively for the Mexican workers through a joint agreement between the Mexican and American governments. The resulting publicity—a full-page ad in the paper the following day—names her as the villain in the incident, misquoting her and misrepresenting her actions. She is furious about it, but her boss is even more so! “The biggest mistake I ever made was hiring you!” he shrieks before stomping off. She’s so upset that “not even a shower and putting on a becoming green jersey dress raised Jeanne’s spirits” after this exchange.

Later she tells off Merritt for attacking her personally, telling him, “I never want to have anything to do with you again!” But that darned guy is “the most exciting person she’d ever met! He’s like a Greek god,” so before long she’s out on a date with him, swooning in his arms on the dance floor. He reveals that his parents were migrant farm workers, and that’s why he is fighting so hard to unionize them. Then he drops the bomb that “I’d have to be the master of my household. If you learn to care for me, it will be because you think I am invincible. In your heart, you want to be dominated.” And that’s where I would make a beeline for the door, but it doesn’t seem to phase Jeanne one bit. “Was he right? Did she really want to be dominated?”

Next the Mexican consul shows up at the clinic because some patients are complaining about Jeanne, and then a patient that Jeanne has prescribed a medication for a stomach bug dies the day after he saw her, so everyone is convinced the man was poisoned by Jeanne’s prescription. Jeanne’s boss takes the opportunity to chew her out again, so she cries on Merritt’s shoulder and in the process decides that she’s in love with him. “If he asked her to marry him, she knew she would accept.”

But the union guys are causing trouble for the growers by getting the migrant workers to refuse to work for them, so their crops can’t be harvested. A good friend of Jeanne’s, Gary Hunter, is a farmer whose small tomato farm is on the brink of bankruptcy, so Jeanne helps him out by spending one Saturday picking tomatoes with a bunch of his friends. Now it’s Merritt’s turn to chew out Jeanne, because she’d crossed a picket line to help Gary, and seethes through most of their date until she finally snaps and tells him that Gary can’t support the unions because their contract requires him to guarantee laborers work 30 hours a week, and his small farm doesn’t need that amount of labor. “He doesn’t make profit enough to pay a lot of idle men,” she points out, so Merritt declares he’s not going to discuss the matter any further, a convenient tactic for jerks who are wrong. The next day, delivering dinner to Gary after he’s been working in the fields, Jeanne discovers that his truck full of tomatoes had been attacked and his crop destroyed by three anonymous gangsters. She’s convinced that Merritt is behind the attack, so she leaves a letter in his mailbox that she never wants to see him again. “She was in love with Merritt, but she had to admit that he had a merciless streak in him.”

How will it all wind up? Likely as you think it will, but not the way you wish it had, as she lets Gary, the nicest man in the book, get away. She also seems entirely pleased to be walking away from her career—well, it must be acknowledged that she’s had the most difficult year ever—to become a wife and mother. Curiously, a side plot about the married doctor she works for possibly having an affair, possibly with Jeanne’s roommate—the doctor repeatedly asks Jeanne to call his house at 10:30 pm and say that he needs to come to the clinic immediately, and Jeanne, the dope, always goes along with this unethical behavior, thinking that “it’s none of my business,” clearly not realizing that her actions are making her a part of it, that she is helping to cause the pain experienced by his young son, with whom she is good friends. We never find out what’s actually behind the doctor’s actions, though Jeanne decides “the doctor would have his periodical affairs, and nothing would change.”  There are some interesting debates about the work that laborers do and how it is valuable but not valued—not unlike those in the similar book Graduate Nurse—and Jeanne’s arguments with Merritt hint that she will stand up to him, he will not be the “master” of his household, and that he will actually appreciate her reasoning from time to time. It would be a more interesting book, though, if these parts played a bigger role, and we had greater confidence that the man might actually come to realize the error of his chauvanistic ways. As it is, it’s a mild enough read, with enjoyable armchair travel of the Southern California desert country.

Nurse Craig

By Marcia Ford
(pseud. Ruby L. Radford), ©1953
Also published as Dixie Nurse

When Nancy Craig set her heart on becoming a nurse, she had no idea of the petty intrigues that surround a large hospital, nor did she realize that a pretty young nurse is often at the mercy of a tyrannical and frustrated supervisor. Unjustly fired from the hospital, Nancy returned to her hometown, leaving behind all her dreams—and the man she loved. But a new life opened up for Nancy when she became the private nurse to a wealthy elderly woman who, because of her generosity, enabled Nancy to build a children’s hospital and to make her biggest dream come true.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“You could make a dying man get well with that smile.” 

“Nancy’s heart always ached for a man at a time like this. There was so little that they could do to help, and their emotions were generally so inhibited by a fear of seeming weak that she knew they must suffer even more than a woman.”

REVIEW:
Nancy Craig wants to be a pediatrics nurse, but no positions ever seem to open up. She spent her first year after graduating doing private duty nursing, then accepted a job at Downer Hospital, where she did her training, in the hope of improving her chances if a pediatrics job becomes available. Unfortunately, there she must suffer at the bony hands of Miss Phillips, the bitter spinster head nurse whose unrequited love for Dr. Barrow has transformed her into a crabapple. She especially hates Nancy because Dr. Barrow has taken an avuncular interest in Nancy’s career for years, and when a patient of Nancy’s vomits one morning, Miss Phillips whisks the vomitus off to the lab for analysis (it was not the salmon mousse)—and when the results are in, she declares that Nancy has given the patient the wrong medicine and fires her on the spot!

Nancy believes that she did not make a mistake—which means that Dr. Barrow, who had changed the patient’s medication order that morning—must have goofed his orders, but that “might ruin his reputation as a physician if it became known,” because no doctor has ever made a mistake before. Curiously, Nancy decides that rather than clear her name, or even have a conversation with Dr. Barrow to alert him to his possible error—which, left unaddressed, will only be repeated—she will take the blame for him, and decides to pack her bags and head back to her home town.

That means she is leaving Dr. Terry Fenton, the hard-working but dirt-poor pediatrician she has fallen for. He is one of those dopes who decides, “I can’t even look at a girl, or think of having a home of my own till I’m free of debt.” At least Nancy has the gumption to snap, “No girl would be worth having if she wasn’t willing to take you as you are!” and when he answers that his wife shouldn’t have to work, she bats that away with equal aplomb: “Oh, be your age, Terry! Suppose the girl doesn’t want to give up her career any more than you do? All women want to work and be independent these days.” You do have to admire Nurse Nancy Craig.

Except that she also has some annoying tendencies, such as to be a bit, well, uptight. When Terry comes to dinner at Nancy’s house, she—and her entire family, it must be confessed—is horrified when the maid brings a dishpan to the dinner table to clear the dishes. She also has a tendency to get very snappish at poor Terry at the least provocation, such as when he asks about other young men in her orbit—which she should, of course, take as driven by jealousy and seek to reassure the poor boy, but instead, “she was seething too much inside to trust herself to speak.”

Not long after she’s home, her father drops of a heart attack, and then she and the doctor conspire to finish him off by not allowing him to even sit up in bed for a month—even playing with his stamp collection is deemed too strenuous, and if the man doesn’t throw a major pulmonary embolism, it won’t be her fault. So she stays on for weeks, spoon-feeding Dad and reading him the newspaper. Nursing is hard work! But finally Dr. Barrow steps in to offer her a job nursing wealthy Mrs. Marshall (the poor dear has no first name) back in Summerton, so she can go home to her apartment—and Dr. Terry. There she gives vitamin B-12 shots and makes the woman take naps twice a day. And she dates Mrs. Marshall’s grandson Bert, who is a nice young man but something of an adventurer, and so has no appeal to Nancy—but he’s rich and handsome, and soon insecure Dr. Terry is convinced that Nancy is going to marry Bert, or Dr. Barrow. Nancy, of course, doesn’t help the man at all when he voices his concerns, snapping, “Why should I miss a good dinner or a show, to sit home waiting for the telephone to ring?” before gathering her “seething emotions” around her like a fox fur stole and flouncing out.

It’s not hard to figure out how the book is going to end—even if it weren’t telegraphed on the back cover blurb—and though that’s not a fatal flaw, the final scene lands pretty flat. Nancy herself is an admirable character, but the situations in the book often seem so flimsily contrived, with over-the-top reactions to a mild situation (such as Nancy’s horror that her sister Ellen wrote to Dr. Terry! The slut!). The story unrolls with few details of interest outside of the litigious way they practice medicine (Nancy saves a woman from strychnine poisoning by giving her morphine), and there’s just not much here to keep one’s interest. You could do worse, but if that’s not a great reason to read this book, I don’t have much else to offer you.

Surgeon's Nurse

By Ann Gilmer
(pseud. William E. Daniel Ross), ©1969
Cover illustration by George Wilson

Working with Dr. Clay Burke was a supreme challenge for any nurse—but for lovely young Jill Rowley, the job meant much more. She was head over heels in love with the brilliant and handsome surgeon, and Clay responded in kind. But he was a widower, with a bitterly jealous teen-aged daughter, and the marriage kept being put off. Jill felt trapped in a dead-end love, and the attentions of dashing Dr. Greg Bonnel grew hard to resist. Then one wintery night a car accident placed a famous Senator and his young secretary on the operating table—and amid tragedy, scandal and intrigue, Jill painfully discovered where a nurse’s highest loyalty lay, and what were the true needs of her own beleaguered heart.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTE:
“I don’t want lovely, young nurses. I prefer the ugly type like you.”

REVIEW:
Jill Rowley is a 23-year-old nurse working for—that’s right—a surgeon, Clay Burke. They hail from Milford, NH, which is an actual out-of-the-way town southwest of Manchester, if you are interested in these geographical niceties (I, a former resident of the Granite State, am). We are told early on that the pair is in love—and we do need to be told this, because it certainly isn’t shown. The hitch is that the widower Clay has a 17-year-old daughter, Ruth, who is not keen on daddy remarrying. So Jill has decided to wait until Ruth changes her mind or moves out before she marries Clay. And five years later she’s still waiting. Good luck with that, I say.

There’s another doctor competing for Jill’s affections, and Clay starts getting jealous of Jill’s time and demanding that she inform him of her location at all times in the event that he needs her in surgery after hours. In the meantime, he is standing her up for the Christmas ball and New Year’s Eve parties, leaving her—in a gold lamé dress with a low-cut back of a smart style and a suitable length—with nowhere to go. And no girl is going to sit still for that.

Then one night, Clay and Jill are working away under the hot lights of the OR, attempting to save a state senator and his young secretary, who have been in a car accident on the slippery winter roads. (There are a lot of slippery roads in this book; apparently New Hampshire is just one constantly frozen tundra.) They’re stitching the patient closed and congratulating themselves on two more lives saved when the woman crashes—she’s been given the wrong blood type due to a mix-up in the lab, and the blunder kills her. The woman’s father, known as Clarence A. Smith throughout the book—I did ask myself on several occasions why the author felt the middle initial was so essential—is a former mental patient who doesn’t take his daughter’s death well, and he starts behaving erratically and making threats against the doctor. So already, by page 33, you know exactly where this book is going, and it drives you straight there on an interstate highway, without any detours or interesting scenery to divert you on the way.

Beyond this, there is not much more to comment on in this book. There is a Nurse Bentley, who is the stereotypical “veteran at the hospital, a maiden lady with an uncertain temper and few friends. And she much disliked her routine upset.” She is repeatedly described in unflattering terms: “A heavy-bodied nurse with a frowning face and horn-rimmed glasses,” “bustling around the room like an angry hippo,” “looking large and enraged.” It’s a type we’ve met before, and seems to be a warning to young nurses not to let their doctor boyfriends get away so they won’t have to “go on as the docile old-maid nurse faithfully serving the man she loved but had not been able to marry.” It’s odd that these seem to be the only two choices for single women, but there it is.

This book is like instant potatoes: It might get the job done, but it just makes you think of the real thing and wish you were having that instead. I’m sorry to say that the best thing about it is that it is a quick read. But then, so is the back of the cereal box—and at least that has something enjoyable inside it.