Dr. Jane Comes Home

Book 5 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1959

 

Woman or doctor? When beautiful, raven-haired Dr. Jane Latham returned to her hometown after her brief, tragic marriage she planned to devote the rest of her life to her profession. She was Jane Latham, doctor, she told herself. She had ceased to be Jane Latham, woman. But when Dave Riley, internationally famous newspaperman, came into her life he had other ideas. He begged Jane to renounce her vows and join him in his own cosmopolitan, easy-going life of fun and travel. Lonely, confused, filled with the ardor of youth, Jane Latham’s effort to deny her woman’s needs now met its sternest test.

 

GRADE: B

 

REVIEW:

I’m not sure what book the person who wrote the back-cover blurb (above) read, but it wasn’t the one I did. Maybe all that is forthcoming in the next (and final) book of the series, Dr. Jane’s Choice. In Dr. Jane Comes Home, it seems to be two years since her husband Bill died—done in by a crocodile in Africa—and one since she returned home to Halesville, Indiana, to resume her general practice. Journalist Dave Riley, whom she met in Africa before she left, has come with her, ostensibly to write an article about her but staying on because he loves this small town that much. Oh, and Jane too, but he’s waiting to spill the beans on that little secret, out of respect for her mourning.

 

Basically this book follows Jane as she manages patients and disasters, sheds an occasional tear over poor dead Bill, and otherwise snoops on minor Halesville characters old and new. A cast of more than 50 named people populate this story, which can be a bit confusing, but otherwise it’s a gentle, meandering story. At the end of the book Dave is in a serious car accident, which of course brings Jane’s latent love for him to the fore with her usual sappy “Oh, Dave, Dave—” which she has sighed again and again for every man who has passed through her heart, much to my increasing exasperation. We’ll see what dilemmas this new relationship brings to her in the final book.

 

It’s a pleasant story, but it doesn’t have much to offer: No offerings for the Best Quotes section; no real growth in Jane’s character; no interesting dilemmas, career or personal, for her to work out. It’s just more of Jane. Which, again, is nice enough—she’s smart, competent, independent, and strong—but unless you’re already this deep into the series and feel compelled to see it through, this book doesn’t really have much to offer.

Dr. Jane’s Choice

Book 6 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1961

Cover illustration by John W. Scott

 

To hundreds of thousands of readers, Doctor Jane Langford (later briefly married to the Reverend Bill Latham) is the most beloved heroine in all medical romance literature. Sternly incorruptible, but often hesitant as she chooses what is right and what is desirable—a gifted surgeon and general practitioner, but a woman first and foremost—Doctor Jane strikes an answering chord in every reader’s heart, for Jane is more than a dedicated professional, she is a woman needing masculine strength and love. In this present novel, Jane is faced with the most important choice of her life—how she reaches that choice makes for one of Adeline McElfresh’s most engrossing novels.

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Don’t you talk her right arm off, Henry. She might need it in surgery in the morning.”

 

“She wanted to share his life, divide herself between being Mrs. Dave Riley and Dr. Jane Latham.”

 

REVIEW:
When we last left Dr. Jane Langford Latham, she was mourning her husband, Bill, killed in Africa by a crocodile, and I am not kidding. She thinks she’s falling for reporter Dave Riley, whom she first met in Africa and who followed her home to Halesville, Indiana, so as to write and wait for her to come around. But Jane isn’t sure, because she really, really loved Bill. So she takes a job at the nearby City Hospital—where she did her residency, by the way (see Dr. Jane, Interne)—as director of outpatient medicine.

 

In the course of her work, she discovers that a local woman who lives in the seedy part of town performs abortions, and goes on the warpath, declaring that she will “not stop until that woman is found, arrested, jailed.” Perhaps not coincidentally, a young pregnant woman from that same neighborhood is found drowned, and now the book turns into a mystery story. Whodunnit? Well, this local reporter, Charley Lewis, takes up the case, and the book is divided between following Jane and her patients, and Charley in his attempts to track down the girl’s killer.

 

I could go into more detail about the case and Jane’s success as a doctor despite her gender, but it’s not really important, and if you didn’t figure out what Jane’s Choice is going to be at the beginning of the last book, Dr.Jane Comes Home, then I won’t spoil it for you. The central question for the reviewer and the reader is, should you read these six books? The problem is that they are neither good enough to make the answer a clear yes, nor bad enough to make it an emphatic no. I always appreciate the quiet competence of the writing, which is occasionally humorous, and here we find a little inside joke: “If you two will excuse me, I’ve got Elizabeth Wesley’s new book. About doctors,” says the wife of Dr. Warren, her former attending in Dr. Jane, Interne. (Elizabeth Wesley is, of course, a pen name of Adeline McElfresh’s!)

 

The books are interesting, but they don’t have a lot of zest or camp to give them sparkle. I enjoyed Jane, but six books about her is a bit much, considering that the format or story of every book was essentially the same: All about Jane and her daily life, and then at the end, a big decision, usually more or less out of the blue, about some man, the “romance” being almost irrelevant to the rest of the book. The mystery that pervades the plot of this book is not a first for the Dr. Jane series—see Calling Dr. Jane—but it’s a bit of a distraction from what is supposed to be the central point, i.e. Jane. So if you don’t have a better book to reach for, go ahead and make the investment in Dr. Jane, but don’t expect her to leap off the page and dazzle you. She’s much too sedate for that.

Nurse Lily and Mister X

By Diane Frazer
(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher), ©1961

Cover illustration by Jerry Allison

 

Her first impression was a huge head with silver-white hair, a bristling mustache and fierce eyes. It was like seeing the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum for the first time after having looked at it hundreds of times in magazines or on post cards. Lily’s professional smile was frozen on her lips. Usually she would approach a patient briskly, her hand outstretched, and introduce herself. She had been taught how to do it in nursing school—with just the right amount of cheerfulness. But this was a man who simply didn’t lend himself to this kind of approach. This was a man who had terrorized the White House, a man even the President was said to be afraid of…

 

GRADE: A

 

BEST QUOTES:

“The most perfectly recovered patient necessarily suffers a relapse when confronted with the bill.”

 

“Dr. DeVries is still in Paris, isn’t he? Cutting up some important Frenchman or other.”

 

“Do you girls have to wear those white stockings? It ruins the nicest legs.”

 

“Can you tell me, please, where to go, nurse? I have a bad case of breaking heart and I need very special care.”

 

“People in love are always a little bit nauseating.”

 

REVIEW:

This nurse novel has it all: wit, intelligence, camp, brisk pacing, a bit of intrigue, and—the cherry on top—a fabulous title and cover illustration. If you read no other VNRN this year, make it this one (or Nurse into Woman; that would be another good choice).

 

Lily Sorenson has been chosen to special a patient whose presence at Physicians Hospital in New York must remain top secret—hence his designation as “Mister X.” He’s a lion of an international diplomat, along the lines of a Kissinger or a Churchill, who will be negotiating a major treaty in a few weeks. If his enemies find out he is in the hospital recovering from “a delicate operation,” this might undermine his position at the conference and affect global politics for generations to come, because he’s that important. But his recovery is going to take weeks, and during the bulk of this time he’s not allowed visitors, phone calls, newspapers, or television. And that’s not going over well.

 

But fortunately, Lily is an excellent and stunningly gorgeous nurse—Mister X is “a connoisseur and a fervent admirer of feminine beauty”—so she alone of all the nurses in New York stands a chance of subduing the great man, who has already roared two other nurses off the job in as many days. Indeed, in minutes, after denying him the newspaper he’s demanding at top volume, Lily has him eating out of her hand. While this is a common plot device in VNRNs, Lily actually deserves it. She banters cleverly with her friends and colleagues, has no interest in giving up her career for marriage, and corrects a State Department official who says that everyone who knows of Mister X’s true identity must keep his mouth shut—“or her,” Lily answers smartly, endearing herself to me forever.

 

With little else to do but sleep, Mister X soon takes an interest in Lily’s personal life, which features a new young man, Andrew Carlton. Mr. Carlton is a reporter who has heard of the hush-hush goings on at the hospital and, hoping to pump Lily for information, asks the nurse he is currently dating to introduce them at a party. He’s instantly smitten with Lily, and recognizes that this poses a serious dilemma: Should he pursue the woman or the scoop? because he can’t have both.

 

Lily is equally taken with Andrew, and the pair spends a lot of time in silence at her apartment: “ ‘Oh, Andrew,’ she said, after a while.” She’s feeding him misinformation about her patient, as directed by the great X himself, who tells her, “Compared to your love life, Lily, affairs of state become mere trivia.” It’s a comedy of intrigue, deception, and even human interest as we—along with Nurse Lily and Mr. X—watch Andrew to find out how he is going to play the cards he is being calculatingly dealt. The story wraps up very neatly, with the final maneuvering by Mr. X putting everything to rights, and the actual ending is as pretty as VNRNs ever get.

 

The dialogue is superb, starts early, and never lets up. You know you are in for a great ride when Lily is called to the chief of surgery’s office on page five, and a colleague asks if she has done something awful. “Let’s see,” Lily replies. “I was picked up by a patrol car early this morning, lying drunk in the gutter. But they can’t possibly know that already.” This book reminds me of Glenna Finlay’s Nurse Pro Tem, in that they both feature that snappy dialogue reminiscent of a film from 1942. The plot is light and easy, but the question of Andrew’s character gives it enough heft to keep it from completely blowing away in the breeze. It would be a perfect companion to a preferably uninterrupted summer afternoon with cosmo, but don’t let lack of either prevent you from enjoying this delightful little book.

Orphanage Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1970

Young, attractive Christine Morgan became a nurse with one end in view—to work at Maple Crest, where she had been raised as an orphan after her parents’ tragic death. There were delightful youngsters in need of loving care at Maple Crest. There was also handsome Dr. Aaron Hoffman, to whom Christine lost her heart, and irrepressible “Fuzz” Kraus, who wanted her to marry him. There was a dire threat to Maple Crest from crusty old Matthew Chancellor, who owned the luxurious estate next door, and dark mystery in his beautiful granddaughter’s strange behavior. All these vivid human threads interwove in a challenge Christine had to meet—to save the place she held dear, and her chance for happiness with the man she loved.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“She wore a white uniform like most women wore a Givenchy gown.”

“Sickness of the body, she could do something about. But hunger of the heart—that was another story entirely.”

“He’d met several interesting women since coming to Bardwell. There was a cute secretary, that one nurse with the red hair and a society dish that had a cute little way of walking and talking.”

REVIEW:
Somehow, between the title and the cover, I had a feeling this book was going to be a little nauseating. Sometimes my premonitions are wrong (see Surf Safari Nurse and Hospital in Kashmir), but sometimes I am right on the money.

Without further ado, I give you Christine Morgan, the eponymous orphanage nurse. She was an orphan herself, a former resident of Maple Crest Home for Children, after her parents were killed in a car crash when she was 14. She dedicated her life to becoming a nurse and has returned to Maple Crest to assist the vintage caretaker, Sarah, in bringing up 25 fresh-faced young orphans.

The orphanage doctor, Aaron Hoffman, is a quiet, sneering guy. Naturally, Christine is in love with him. We have to be told this repeatedly early on, because the doctor has no redeeming qualities that I could see, and without all the signposts you’d never believe it.

The crotchety old millionaire next door, Matthew Chancellor, hates kids, and has a tempestuous relationship with his only relative, granddaughter Sherrill, who has quit college and just returned home to the mansion. In a shocking coincidence, at the same time a newborn baby turns up in the orphanage bushes. The label has been cut off the blanket the baby is wrapped in, yet enterprising reporter/asshole Pete Jennings tells Christine that the blanket is sold by “only five stores in the entire state.” Boy, with skills like that, Pete is going to have no trouble finding his “big story” to make his name. He’s convinced that his big break is this baby story, and he’s going to track down the mother and spill her humiliation in the papers. But since the publicity about the baby is good for the orphanage, Christine and the doctor keep inviting him in despite their dislike of him and his recurrent rudeness. (Curiously, at the end of the book when Pete finally has the facts nailed, he makes a surprising about-face for no apparent reason and opts not to publish the story after all.)

In the meantime, Sherrill offers to help out at the orphanage. Once in the door she has a tendency, sometimes during a crisis about a sick or runaway child, of throwing herself into Christine’s arms and sobbing about her grandfather, who quashed her relationship with local kid Billy White, who was later killed in Vietnam. Christine responds by confronting old Mr. Chancellor about his hatred for the orphanage, telling him—prepare yourself—“You’re afraid to come to Maple Crest. Afraid you might discover you’ve got a heart after all.”

Sherrill is becoming increasingly attached to the baby, now unfortunately named Dawn. Christine quickly comes to depend on Sherrill, and within two days of Sherrill’s arrival on the scene, Christine has no qualms at all about leaving a college dropout who can’t be more than 20 years old in charge of 25 kids and an infant while she runs off on dates with Dr. Aaron and Donald “Fuzz” Kraus, who is desperately in love with Christine. Aaron is also falling for Christine, and we are treated to endless insecurities on both sides of the relationship, which gets old mighty fast. The only thing more cloying is the syrupy language of their blossoming love: “For a moment, their eyes met and held, and when he reached out to take her hand, she reached halfway. … The pressure of Aaron’s fingers around her own was a sweet, sharp pleasure.” It gets worse, but I’ll spare you.

As the book moves to its ending, Christine declines dinner with the doctor because Fuzz has asked her out, and at the end of their date he “pulled her into his arms and kissed her soundly.” You will be as surprised as I was when he tells Christine just a few hours later that he’s in love with Sherrill and wants to marry her. His fickleness is capped only by Sherrill’s, as we learn that she was actually married to Billy White not much more than nine months previously. In a way, it’s a sad indictment of commitment and responsibility, but somehow I doubt that the author had such heavy themes in mind when she penned this throwaway.

In the event that you haven’t foreseen where this review is going (which should be about as hard to fathom as the “surprise” ending of this book), let me spell it out: Orphanage Nurse is treacly, insulting to the intelligence, and amazingly improbable. Don’t waste your time.

Beauty Contest Nurse

By Diana Douglas, ©1973
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

When tawny-eyed nurse Maria MacKenzie sought to escape the routine and regimentation of the Veterans’ Hospital, she never expected anything like her job at a luxurious resort hotel in Acapulco. Assigned to the girls in the Miss All-America Beauty Contest, Maria soon discovered that her feminine attributes as a lovely young woman were more important than her nursing skill—especially with Dick Trevor, the attractive newspaperman covering the contest. Dr. Mitch Gilbert, her handsome, informal boss, was another surprise; as was Andrew Fisher, the powerful, red-headed doctor who was so mysteriously involved behind the scenes. One of these men would change the course of Maria’s life. Caught up in the heady excitement of her glamorous surroundings, could she trust her heart to make a wise choice…?

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTE:
“She proved to be too fertile, and the husband, though proud of his efficiency, could not keep up with the needs of his growing family, so he left her one night. She has found others since, but they leave when she becomes pregnant.”

“She had never really trusted blondes with ingenuous, baby-blue eyes.”

“Maybe you could marry the guy and keep a firm hand on the skillet.”

REVIEW:
Maria MacKenzie is the official nurse at the Miss All-America Beauty Contest in Acapulco, but naturally as she steps from her limo at the hotel where the contest is being staged, all the reporters think she is one of the contestants, seeing as how she is just so gosh-darned beautiful! Dick Trevor, a reporter from the New York Evening Star is smitten before she reaches the door. Once inside, she meets Dr. Mitchell Gilbert and Bill Bryant, pageant organizer, who doesn’t remember who she is but knows what hotel room she’s staying in. The job doesn’t seem to be demanding; as Dr. Gilbert tells her, “I expect we’ll need to prescribe and administer an occasional tranquilizer for tantrums, aspirin for the cyclical troubles, or an antibiotic for a chill or something. That would be about the extent of it.”

That afternoon, tanning on the beach with her bikini top untied so as to erase the white lines across her back (remember when we actually did this?), she is approached by a red-haired surfer who tells her that the two guys out there riding the waves are risking their lives, because the surf is dangerous. Sure enough, one of them falls off his board and is dragged under. The red-haired man instantly leaps to the rescue, and when he snags the stricken surfer and promptly loses his own board, Maria swims out to help them both. As she assesses the injured surfer and suggests a “ring pad” for the man’s head injury, the red-haired man naturally reveals himself to be a doctor and orders her to get his bag from his beat-up jalopy, which is parked in the beach lot. His name is stamped in gold letters on the bag—Andrew Fisher, M.D.

Dr. Fisher has been fired from his job at the hotel because he spends too much time at a local clinic giving free medical care to the natives. This intrigues Maria, and soon she and the reporter are wending their way through the slums of Acapulco, looking for him. But he’s not there—he’s gone to a small village, where the natives grow excellent corn, eat too much of it, and come down with pellagra, or niacin deficiency, which gives its victims a beefy red tongue and the three D’s: diarrhea, dementia, and dermatitis. I tell you, if I read enough of these books, I won’t have to study when it’s time to re-take the boards.

Dick Trevor is taken with the idea of publicizing Dr. Fisher’s work in his newspaper, and Maria is taken with the doctor. She rounds with him through the village, treating the natives in their adobe houses where “traces of the vomitus and excreta which were symptoms of the disease still lingered in the small, airless room.” Back at the hotel, Maria puts in an appearance at the hotel clinic and the pageant, where she drinks too much champagne with Dr. Fisher and then goes parking with him, the tramp. The next day she’s back in the village—I can’t believe she doesn’t get fired from her pageant job—but Dr. Fisher falls down a cliff, and the big climax of the book is his rescue. Has he been killed in the fall? How will he find the money he needs to care for the natives? You won’t need three guesses to figure out the answers.

This book reminded me a lot of Nurse in Acapulco, and not because they share the same setting. Both are mostly phoned in, with jaunts into a country village and a lot of time spent lecturing on one particular disease. It’s not quite as annoying as Nurse in Acapulco, though. No one is terribly irritating, and Acapulco and the Mexican countryside are well-drawn, so you can do a little vicarious touring. It’s a book to reach for if you are looking for an airy little fling that won’t trouble your intellect or your sense of humor at all.

The Nurse Was Juliet

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1965 

Julie hated what he stood for. Change to her beloved little mountain town. Change in the way she and her doctor mother conducted their small clinic for the people of the hills. Change in her fiancé, till now the most dependable thing in Nurse Juliet’s life. And most frightening of all—change in her heart. How could she hate a man—hate everything he died—and still dream of him all the time? 

GRADE: C 

BEST QUOTES: 

“A home and a husband and children are a woman’s trinity.” 

“This is for life; not for a romantic novel.” 

REVEIW: 

When you know an author was turning out several books a month, it’s hard not to feel a little guilty for expecting more from a book than formula. But darn it, when I see the same setup again and again, I am annoyed—especially when it’s just minor aspects of the story that wouldn’t be all that tough to switch up. For example, in this Peggy Gaddis throwaway, we meet Miss Sarah, who lives in the rough-hewn cabin set at the top of a long winding path far from the nearest road—a de rigueur setting for at least one character in four of the five of her books I’ve read to date. 

In this one, our eponymous nurse hails from a small dirt-poor town in the Georgia mountains—another big stretch for Ms. Gaddis. Steve Hayden, a newspaper reporter from Atlanta, comes to town to cover a murder trial that had a change of venue to this backwater location, and from the moment she claps eyes on him, Juliet Cochran is nasty and mean beyond all reason. You see, she is furious that the name of her hometown will be forever sullied, as people will think the murder happened here rather than just the trial, and she blames Steve for this. 

Oddly, however, she is also opposed to her fiancé’s hopes of improving the place. “He’s going to do everything he can to change Haleyville, first by getting a good road to the county seat and then, no doubt, by getting a hospital over here,” she snarls. She doesn’t mind the poverty of the residents, their hardscrabble lives, their miserable and crowded living conditions, that the “girls marry before they get out of their teens, some of them before they get into their teens,” because it’s what she’s known all her life. Besides, her parents are doctors, so she doesn’t have to live that way, which makes it all just charming and quaint. 

The aforementioned Miss Sarah has a “crumpled old face” and graying hair, and she calls herself “a cross-grained old woman,” and “a battered old creature.” Juliet visits the housebound recluse every week to give her “a life-giving injection that would keep her going for another week.” (That must be some shot!) But Steve digs up a shocking secret about her: It seems that she married a very wealthy man from New York when she was 18 and gave birth to a son a year later, only to run away back to her shack shortly afterward. Steve finds the 26-year-old Gerard and brings him to meet his mother, and all is right with the world. And now for the real shock—Miss Sarah is actually just 45 years old! Apparently the hardscrabble mountain life really takes a toll on a person. 

The millionaire Gerard then sets out to upgrade Haleyville. In a matter of months, new houses are springing up all over town, the roads get paved, banks open, industries move in, and the general store starts carrying Capri pants, halters, and Bermuda shorts. If only we had this guy on President Obama’s economics team, we’d have the recession turned around in no time. Juliet begins to see that jobs are a good thing after all, although it may be the latest fashion trends that really melt her cold, cold heart. All that remains is for her to dump her fiancé and for Steve to swing by and claim his prize, and we can toss this book over our shoulders.

This book has a couple of odd moments. One is its interest in spanking, though it would not be the only VNRN to have this unhealthy obsession. “What an unpleasant creature you are! Dr. Laura, I’m afraid you didn’t spank her often enough when she was growing up,” Juliet’s fiancé says of her. A few chapters later, Steve chimes in, “For two cents I’d turn you across my knee and wallop the daylights out of you.” Juliet reacts by catching her breath with wide eyes, as if this is an actual possibility. “And don’t tempt me by saying I wouldn’t dare!” he continues. “I can’t think of anything at the moment I’d rather do! It’s way past time when somebody should have done it!” The whole idea is wrong in so many ways—from the apparent acceptability of violence against women, to treating women like children, to the hint of kinkiness to the act—that it could be an entire term paper in someone’s women’s studies class.

Then there’s the fact that Juliet and her mother have hired Aunt Jemima to do their cooking. “Mattie, vast and ebony-hued and immaculate in her dark print dress and white apron,” is constantly urging the women to eat in her honey-chile vernacular. “Miss Laura, you ain’t had a mouthful of vittles!” she scolds Juliet’s mother. “Mattie was at the stove, smiling a white-toothed welcome that split her ebony face into a happy smile … fists on her ample hips.” Like Mammy in Gone with the Wind, she’s a sympathetic and caring character, but one that nonetheless makes me wince.

This book is not Peggy Gaddis’s finest, nor her worst. She does pursue her habit of picking up certain words or phrases and beating them to death—I think she referred to “vertical” farms on at least three occasions—once was good, but enough is enough. She also hints at things that are never answered: There’s the suggestion that something happened to Juliet when she was in nursing school—“Here was a girl who had been badly hurt sometime, undoubtedly during the years she had spent in Atlanta,” Steve thinks—though we are never told what happened, or even if this is in fact the case. Juliet herself is not a terribly sympathetic character, as she is always sniping at someone, and she is called selfish by several characters, including her mother. But for its flaws, it’s pleasant enough, especially if you haven’t already read other Peggy Gaddis books.