Dr. Jenny of Timberland

By Isabel Stewart Way, ©1964

In the surgical wing after the operation, young Dr. Mike took Jenny’s hand. “You were wonderful, Jenny. You saved this man’s life. You’re so young—a girl. I couldn’t believe it.” Suddenly he was holding her in his arms, kissing her with a strange ardor. Just as suddenly he let her go. “My tribute,” he said formally, “to a very able doctor.” Lovely, young Jennifer Warden was a skilled and dedicated physician, but this handsome, arrogant man had touched something deeper in her nature—her pride as a woman!

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Gossip is like a bottle of strong medicine—you’re entirely remiss if you don’t check the label before and after giving.” 

“Let’s get away from here fast—before these hospital smells seep in and anesthetize us both!”

“Don’t you laugh, Missy! It ain’t no joke for a man to find himself without his pants! Especially around females!”

“What a loo-loo of a redhead! Any chance to make out with her?”

REVIEW:
Dr. Jennifer Warden was all set to step into a cushy job as a general practitioner when she got the call from an old friend to help out at the High Valley Lumber Corporation’s mountain hospital, caring for the employees and their families at a clinic that “runs the usual gamut of cases from obstetrics to brain surgery.” Doesn’t sound like work for a GP, but Dr. Jenny is “smart at surgery,” so she’s tapped for the job. She’s not wild about it, but the chief suggests that she’s a little too, well, flirtatious, and tells her, “You need to find yourself, Jenny. You’ve got to find some way to bring the woman and the physician into accord within you, Jenny.” She accepts the assignment, though, because she realizes that “when a good-looking guy looked at her with admiration, she felt a definite response. In fact, she liked to feel this response, liked to feel the warmth spreading through her veins, liked the tingling excitement that a man’s kiss could give.” I’m not sure how working in a logging camp is going to fix that, or if that’s even a problem. 

Not surprisingly, the plan to “integrate” her two selves gets off to a poor start when she meets company general manager and hot guy Nathan MacLaren, who immediately decides, “As soon as I can arrange the company affairs, I’m going to get sick—and have a nice long stay at our camp hospital!” He asks her to dinner and she agrees, then chastises herself: “She was banishing herself to the lumber-camp hospital just to get well rid of this frivolous, unprofessional attitude toward men!” But she decides to worry about that tomorrow, and sets off for some dinner and dancing and smooching.

Up at the hospital, though, there’s this big oaf, Dr. Mike Raditche, who scowls a lot and seems to regard women doctors rather poorly. So even before chapter two, we’re prepared for the old trope about falling for the guy you hate. And on day one, when a tree falls on Benjy Hart, Jenny acts as lead surgeon for a middle lobectomy, a surgery very nicely described, in which Mike assists—and then afterward confesses, “I was appalled at first, when Dr. Luke said you’d do it—you’re so young, somehow, and a girl! But well, it was thrilling to watch you, and a privilege to assist.” Thanks, Mike. He crowns the backhanded compliment with another one, grabbing her and kissing her, “vehemently, with fierce ardor,” and then calls it a “tribute.” Do we think he kisses Dr. Luke after an appendectomy?

She’s on her way home the next day when one nurse’s boyfriend, logger Gig, offers to drive her home but takes her to a mountaintop and kisses her without asking. She isn’t so pleased about that and jumps in his jeep and drives herself home, leaving him to walk. But in her anger—and, of course, “peculiar attraction” for Gig—she forgets about her postop patient Benjy, who’s been running a temp, because she had been “sunk in her own female ramifications of emotion!” Whatever that means. Mike and Luke have patched up the patient, and Jenny goes to the hospital to confess all, even her attraction for Gig, which seems a bit excessive. They forgive her—but Gig tells everyone in camp that Jenny was chasing him, and that Benjy almost died due to her neglect, and now everyone else is quite cool to her.

Benjy’s wife arrives in the hospital to have a baby but refuses to let Jenny see her, even though Jenny is the only doctor available, and the nurses keep mum about the patient’s incipient delivery until it’s essentially showing its little head and are forced to alert Jenny to the situation. It’s a tough delivery and the baby almost dies, but Jenny brings it around with mouth-to-mouth rescuscitation. Later Mike chews out the nurses, and Jenny feels all warm inside to have “a man championing a woman’s honor,” but then goes all frosty when he tells her that she’s a “damned good doctor! You’ve got the right to practice your profession without these personal things coming between you and your work!” Because he’s thinking of her as a doctor, not a woman. Grrrr!

The two become close partners, but it peeves her that he seems to think of her only as a friend. “This was, of course, what Dr. Devers had prescribed for her—removal to a climate where men wouldn’t notice her, except as a member of her sacred profession. But it certainly was a bland tasteless medicine.” Fortunately Nathan shows up, takes her to dinner, and proposes, but if she wants to say yes to him, she has to say goodbye to medicine. “You were created to be a woman, Jennifer, and not a sexless professional! You’re made to be a wife, a mother, the center of a home,” he tells her. “She smiled at him, feeling protected and desirable and feminine—and she liked it.” But she cuts short their date so she can bone up on a surgery she’s doing with Mike the next day. Still, she’s mad at both men—Mike who doesn’t seem interested in her as a woman, and Nathan who wants her to give up her profession. Who will she choose?

The problem with this book is that is main premise—woman vs. professional—is completely weak and illogical, not to mention sexist. It’s not clear how Jenny is supposed to “integrate” both aspects of her personality, unless it means that she’s supposed to fall in love, but she’s not supposed to like going out with or kissing men, because that would make her a “flirt.” Interestingly, though, there is a quick reference to the fact that Mike, completely immersed in his career, has sacrificed his own heart; “If a man is ever to be a good doctor, he has to go through that phase, that wholehearted absorption in his work. Of course, Mike has been in that phase for a long time,” notes Dr. Luke with dismay. Jenny is miseducated by the times—she constantly blames herself for accepting a ride home from Gig the day he assaults her, and seems sadly bought into the belief that if she has a home life (“is a woman”) then she must sacrifice her professional life, to an even greater extent that women must continue to do so even today. But she is generally a strong character who regularly stands up for herself and demonstrates a lot of confidence, and skill, in her work. Another plus is that we get to observe a lot of medicine in this book, even a couple surgeries in detail. In the end this book has enough decent features to make it worth reading, even if the main trope is stale and stupid.

Nurse on the Riviera

By Jane Converse (pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1968

 

She took the posh European assignment to be near Bill Lindley. It seemed ideal, really. Private duty nurse to millionaire Richard Olner; guest of her patient, and his son and daughter on the glamorous Riviera. Once there, Terry Crane realized she’d made a mistake. The handsome and eligible Dr. Lindley was enjoying himself immensely—with the jet-set crowd. And Terry found herself alone in a climate perfect for love. … That’s when her millionaire patient turned romantic and his twenty-four-year-old son turned competitive. That’s when the amorous French doctor entered her life. For Terry Crane romance was everywhere on the Riviera—except in the eyes of the one man she really loved.

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“It’s bad medicine to create a scene.”

 

REVIEW:

Terry Crane is in love with Dr. Bill Lindley. We’re told that on the second page, and we’ll just have to take Terry’s word for it, because we hardly know the man. They exchange a few perfunctory words about their patient, a wealthy 46-year-old businessman felled by a major stroke, and then the crickets start chirping. She agrees to tag along on the patient’s trip to France, despite the fact that he’s recovered pretty well at this point—his main disability seems to be … an aggravating propensity … to drop ellipses into his speech … every few words or so … a trait that Terry adopts … to my increasing annoyance …. Her sole motivation is to spend more time with Dr. Lindley, but once they arrive, he sets off for the swankier spots along the Cote d’Azur, leaving Terry to wander the halls of the villa and go on occasional dates with the local medecin, Dr. Armand Gautier. After a few dinners, though, she tells him she’s in love with Dr. Lindley, and that ends that minor diversion. With little else to do, patient Richard falls in love with Terry and begins pressing her to marry him, much to the chagrin of his money-grubbing children. She resists him, too, but now she can squabble with the kids, who are intent on scaring her off.

 

After about a hundred pages in which Terry sees no sights but frequently moans that she’s missing out on all the action, and sees not much more of the elusive Dr. Lindley, we’re finally treated to some action! A boat crashes off shore during the local festival, and one of the passengers is found to have smallpox, so now Terry and the long-absent Dr. Lindley, returned a moment ago from Cannes, are to help vaccinate the village. But the crazy townspeople are under the impression that it’s bubonic plague that has washed ashore, and they are freaking out!!! Even Richard and his kids are flinging their Louis Vuitton cases pell-mell into the Mercedes and making for Paris! (They’re stopped by a roadblock set up for a quarantine, so back they slink in shame.) Bill heads for the clinic to do what little he can, like unpack boxes of medical supplies, since he does not have a license to practice medicine in France, and Terry goes downtown to help a French nurse quell a riot. Since Terry speaks little French, she is equally useless; all she can do is bolster the confidence of the shy nurse, who rises to the occasion and the day is saved!

 

This book is a waste of time. We are stuck in the villa most of the time and so take in little of the Riviera, which might at least provide some entertaining armchair travel. We are not at all invested in Terry’s devotion to the elusive Dr. Bill, so we share none of her anguish at his apparent disinterest and no joy at his (surprise) change of heart. The patient and his family are not appealing, even when they’re being snarky and mean, and the “excitement” of the end seems downright dopey, since smallpox is now a thing of the past and government laboratories, and the bubonic plague only makes me think of the Monty Python skit (“Bring out your dead!”). Even the trumped-up crisis of the ending shows us nothing about our heroine, and her and Bill’s part in it seems fairly trivial, even silly (Terry spurs the timid nurse to courage by fingering the veil of her nurse’s cap, which is supposed to remind her of the importance of her calling as a nurse). The writing is flat, and it wasn’t until page 110 that I found one small snippet to offer you as a Best Quote. Jane Converse is capable of putting out a great book, but not, apparently, on the Riviera.

Big Town Nurse

By Patti Stone, ©1965
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

Beth Patton, R.N. left her small-town home for an exciting year in a city medical center—a year which was to shape the course of her entire career. The patients, the surgery, the tense excitement of “big time” medicine, thrilled the young nurse. But before long, Beth was in trouble. First, she disobeyed orders and was lucky not to be fired. Second, two handsome young doctors were romantically interested in her—and Beth knew that a wrong choice would be a disaster to her as a woman and a nurse.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Her curves do something even for the most shapeless of white uniforms—not that her uniforms are every shapeless.”

“I always did like Georgia peaches—especially blond, cuddly ones.”

“I’ll wait while you put your face on or whatever girls do to look glamorous and efficient at the same time.”

“Keep up the good work, Florence Nightingale. You look real cute and earnest winding a gauze bandage.”

“What a bonbon of a girl you are.”

“Why, what a pretty little thing you are. I would never have guessed you were a nurse.”

“We don’t want a long engagement, but we’ve got to have some time to get to really know each other.”

REVIEW:
Beth Patton has been booted from her small-town home in Hooperville, Texas, by her grandfather, and sent to work at the Mallory Medical Center in Houston. (But Houston is not exactly a big town, as billed in the book’s title. Just pointing that out.) They are both of a type: She is yet another orphan nurse, and Grampy is the classic country general practitioner. She won’t be alone there, though, because there’s another stereotypical VNRN character to keep her company: The slightly older boy-next-door, Pete Verbeck, has become a doctor and is interning there, and his twin sister Paula is a lab tech. The pair welcome Beth with open arms: Paula asks Beth to move into her apartment with her and her roommate, nurse Donna Brook, and Pete swoons: “You know, you’re the only girl in the world whose freckles look like gold dust.”

Beth is just irritated by his poetic flattery, partly because she feels he is too frivolous as a doctor. When a bus crashes and the victims are brought in to the ED where Beth is working, Pete breezes in and flirts with one patient: “Have no fear. Dr. Pete’s here.” Beth is infuriated, but “to her surprise the girl looked as if she would have even giggled if she could”—if she hadn’t broken her jaw, poor thing. Pete works tirelessly as a doctor, “but he handled everything so lightly—as if it were a game. ‘Is that all being a doctor means to him,’ Beth wondered. ‘A game—like swimming or golf—something he simply enjoys because he can do it well?’ ”

Instead she is attracted to Dr. Wayne Bega, the grumpy surgical resident. She can’t help but be impressed by him when she hears him animatedly discussing an appendectomy in the cafeteria. “Ruefully she contrasted his dedication with Pete’s breezy manner. ‘Dr. Bega is just what a doctor should be,’ she thought.” But Pete calls her on this: “You’ve been so darned sheltered. It’s made you just a trifle trite, my honey. You put everybody in little boxes. ‘To be dedicated a doctor has to be serious.’ It’s a black and white rule-book world you live in Beth—but it’s no more realistic than a Victorian novel.” But she is unswerving in her devotion to Dr. Bega, and invites him to come home with her for Christmas when he has nowhere else to go.

Raised in a grim, poverty-stricken mining town, Wayne has scrabbled his way into his career, because as God is his witness, he’ll never be hungry again. “To me there’s nothing good about poverty. It’s only degrading,” he tells her, adding that he hardly ever speaks to his brothers, both poor, because they seem contented with their lot. This rubs Beth the wrong way, because she’s lived and worked among poor farmers and fisherman, and knows the dignity of poverty. Pete’s family, on the other hand, is extremely wealthy, and his father runs the Seaview Sanatorium for the well-to-do back in Hooperville, where wealthy women go to recover from their nervous breakdowns and wealthy men from their alcoholic binges. Pete’s got a job alongside his father waiting for him when he finishes his residency in a few months, and this, too, rankles Beth, that he would take such a degrading job.

But Christmas vacation holds a few surprises. Grampy, for starters, thinks Wayne is an egotistical upstart, and Wayne thinks Grampy—Grampy!—is hopelessly old-fashioned. Then Wayne injures his back waterskiing and is ensconced at the Verbeck sanatorium. The ubiquitous epidemic strikes, and Beth and Pete are back in the harness, working themselves to the bone at Grampy’s little clinic. Grampy takes up Pete as his right hand, and Beth begins to afford Pete some very grudging respect. When Pete suddenly becomes mopey and glum after they return to Houston, Beth is suddenly playing the hypocrite: “How many times had she wanted him to be serious and dignified—now that he was—she missed the old Pete more than she had thought possible.” The solemn Pete unburdens himself one evening to Beth: He’s turning down the job at his father’s clinic and is going to work alongside Grampy as a GP. Oh, and will Beth marry him? He’s “one of the best friends she had,” but she can’t imagine marrying him, even if any VNRN reader past puberty can see where this book is headed. And when Wayne proposes four pages later, after a rant about how foolish Pete is to turn down the Seaview job, Beth can’t help but accept. She’s “too dazed to question” when Wayne tells her that “my wife won’t work” and that he can’t wait to buy her a ring because “I want everybody in the world to see that Beth Patton belongs to me.” She has evolved, but only somewhat: “A strange shadow crossed Beth’s mind. No one should belong to anybody else, like a piece of property. But of course, a man in love says things like that. ‘Your wish is my command,’ she whispered.” Well, for now, anyway.

The signs that this match is doomed come fast and furious. A few days later, Wayne tells Beth that he has resigned his residency and taken the Seaview job that Pete turned down, giving up his dream of being a surgeon. Beth is horrified. “You’ll be a—handyman for neurotics and alcoholics and rich women. All your talent will be wasted,” she tells him, but he just talks about all the great stuff he’ll be able to buy with his enormous paycheck. Then when Beth tells Grampy that she’s going to marry Wayne, Grampy freaks out: “You’re a girl raised in the tradition of service. As his wife, your skill and your mind will wilt. I’ll never approve of this marriage—never.” Beth still refuses to see the light, and over the ensuing weeks attempts to persuade Wayne to go back to surgery, but these conversations always end up in “slashing quarrels.” Weeping on the couch one evening, Beth is found by Pete, who gently asks her, “Are you really in love with Wayne—or are you in love with the dream of a dedicated surgeon?” Beth vows she will never confide in Pete again—“That was certain!”

Then Beth and Pete, working the ambulance shift together one day, go to a Mexican tenement to deliver a baby when a gas oven explodes and Beth is trapped by the fire. Rescued by Pete, and wrapped in bandages back at Mallory, Beth realizes who she really loves. When Wayne comes to see her, he tells her that he’s asked for his surgical residency back and will be returning to Mallory in a few weeks. Too late, Wayne is crushed when Beth tells him she’s leaving him for Pete, but Beth consoles herself that “he had found himself able to face things honestly at last. His return to Mallory proved that. And she was sure when the first blow to his ego eased, he would find challenge and comfort in surgery that would make him forget her, even quicker than he thought he would.” She’s probably right, but it still sounds a bit pat.

Overall, this is a very good book. There are enough campy lines from Pete and Donna to liven it up, and the characters are not as facile as I usually encounter in a VNRN. It may well take the prize for packing in the most stereotypical characters and situations of any nurse novel I’ve read, but that doesn’t bother me when the book makes good use of them—the plots of Romeo and Juliet and Pride and Prejudice might seem hackneyed, too. Patti Stone recycles plot devices we’ve encountered in her past novels, and stuffs the book with more than 50 named characters, but its worst flaw may well be the inexplicable way Beth turns to Pete after the fire. Nonetheless, these problems are forgivable when the book is as readable, entertaining, and engaging as Big Town Nurse.

Redheaded Nurse

Bennie C. Hall, ©1960
Cover illustration by Gilbert Riswold

Jane Hamilton stood on the top deck of the cruise ship Madrigal, watching the twinkling lights that marked the Mediterranean shoreline. It was midnight, and the sound of laughter and music floated up from the Carnival Room on the deck below. She had known so few carefree hours in her young life, and now she longed to become a part of the gaiety surrounding her—but as ship’s nurse, she was here to work, not to enjoy herself. It would be so easy, she thought, to set conscience aside and forget her job—to surrender completely to a world where anything might happen…

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“They’ll dance, drink and make merry till dawn—and tomorrow they’ll die.”

“Nurses are for healing, not feeling.”

“He removed her cape from her shoulders and folded it as carefully as if it were—well, at least squirrel.”

“Never jump to conclusions, Janie, though I’ll admit most of us redheads do. Remember—it’s impossible to look at a cat and tell when and how far it’s going to jump. It’s the same way with people. You can’t assign characters to human beings and expect them to stay put. They’ll fool you every time.”

“The best sedative was an open mind and a clear conscience.”

“Aside from an occasional headache or an upset stomach, the passengers had remained disgracefully well.”

“It was like a man, she reflected, to be excused for an infraction of the rules, whereas she, a woman, had to wear her remorse like a heavy blanket.”

“Peter was a very studious person and innocent of the implications of a gift from the Island of Lesbos.”

“I thought I’d inherited a temperamental redhead who would know more about catching a man than about curing whatever ailed him.”

REVIEW:
At one point, after being sunk by Cruise Ship Nurse and Sea Nurse, I threatened to toss all my cruise ship VNRNs right into the brink if I got one more dud. Redheaded Nurse doesn’t exactly make up for those two duds, but it will stay dry for the time being.

Jane Hamilton has been selected from all the nurses at her Boston charity hospital to fill the position of head nurse aboard the cruise ship Madrigal. The doctor on board, Dr. Jerry Clayton, is usually mean to her. It’s her “copper curls,” you see, that push Dr. Clayton over the edge, and he asks her to pull her cap down over her ears to hide them when she’s on duty. “You’re too young. And too beautiful,” explains Schuyler Dawson, a young man on the ship. “Chances are he wanted someone more mature, less decorative.” Jane is drawn to young Sky, though early on she had decided he must be a paid companion to one of the older passengers, Mrs. Carter-Peterson. “She knew all about those unscrupulous characters known as ‘gigolos,’ but she had never expected to meet one face to face.” Then Mrs. C-P tells Jane that Sky has stolen a diamond locket from her, and Jane is convinced that Sky is a “slick fellow” whom she should avoid. So the next day, when he plays up to her, she naturally agrees to go dancing with him that night and ashore with him in Alexandria, Egypt, the next day.

They have a great time, dancing as one—but then suddenly Jane realizes that all the other ship’s passengers have left the building. They have to fly across town in a pokey old cab while the ship’s horn is sounding insistently in the background, sprinting down the dock and losing Jane’s hat to reach the gangplank in time while all the passengers watch in amusement. This incident leaves Jane totally mortified beyond reason, and she determines never to go ashore again, until the captain scolds her, “It’s gotten so now your hair shirt is showing—and it’s not a bit becoming with those copper curls.” So all is right again in Jane’s simple little world.

In the meantime, Mrs. C-P has decided to throw a party for all the children at some port of call and give them all dolls, because the poor waifs don’t have any. On an expedition into a part of Alexandria that the captain had expressly forbidden passengers to enter, she is exposed to a smallpox epidemic. While helping the dowager sew dresses for the nude dolls, Jane notices a rash on the back of the older woman’s neck … and so the two ladies are quarantined for a week, until it is determined that it’s some other disease and not smallpox that the great lady has contracted. As a reward for her selfless duty, Jane is allowed to pick out one bracelet from Mrs. C-P’s collection, and inadvertently chooses the most expensive one there—the stone is so huge, it couldn’t possibly be anything other than costume jewelry. She wears it to another dance on the ship, where Sky sets her straight about its real value—and then the bauble disappears that night after he smooches her to such effect that “she could only feel as if she did not exist as a person but only as a part of Sky.” Jane begins castigating herself that “she had fallen in love with a playboy and a card shark. … He goes on one cruise after another in order to play poker with the wealthy passengers and fleece them.”

I am sure that I don’t have to tell you that in the end all this misunderstanding is cleared away, and Jane is proved once again to be a silly little girl. Some older VNRNs have this gentle feeling about them, like chiffon floating on air. Redheaded Nurse is one such book, with a soft touch both in the writing, characters, and situations they are put through. Jane’s mortifications and crises are really small molehills, and we can pass through them without a wrinkled brow. In the end, the book is so light that it doesn’t really amount to much, even if it does have a noticeable flavor of camp to liven things up a bit. But it’s enough to make me want to attempt another VNRN cruise.