Mary Ellis, Student Nurse

By Hope Newell, ©1958 

Mary Ellis Stebbins, the delightful heroine of A Cap for Mary Ellis, who left her home in New York’s Harlem to attend a newly integrated nursing school upstate, is sure her second year of study will bring many problems. It does, but they have little to do with racial conflict—for the most part, they concern her additional responsibilities as a second-year student. And then there is the entirely welcome complication of furthering her friendship with a nice young intern!

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“I think I’ve finally persuaded her that there are more important things in life than comfort.” 

“If you youngsters talked less about managing patients and more about understanding them you’d make a lot more headway.”

“How annoying patients can be when they try to make things easy for nurses.”

“Lots of girls take up nursing with the idea of being angels of mercy to the sick and suffering and all but idolized by their grateful patients. Then they meet up with a few Miss Swopes and find out that even angels are not always appreciated. Before they know it they’ve forgotten their high ideals and begin to think of nursing as just a way to make a living.”

“It wasn’t necessary to answer insulting people.”

REVIEW:
Mary Ellis Stebbins is returning to Woodycrest Memorial Hospital for her second year of nursing; she was one of two Black students admitted the year prior when the school integrated, and a third Black woman is starting this fall as a new student. The incoming class is introduced to the second years, and each is given a “little sister” to mentor, so immediately we have 14 nursing students to keep straight—not helped by the fact that they are all given fairly stupid nicknames. Mary Ellis, for example, is called Tater, because last year she was posing as a patient when another student was practicing washing, and was told that the amount of water she was using wasn’t enough to clean a potato. And so it goes for 13 more young ladies. 

Each incoming student has some handicap to overcome—some are just poor with scraped-together wardrobes, but Claudia Orcott had a “coasting accident”—not really sure what that is, sledding, possibly—and disfigured her nose; even though grumpy plastic surgeon Dr. Meyers refuses to do plastic surgery “merely for cosmetic reasons,” Mary Ellis decides she’s going to ask him to fix Claudia’s horrific appearance, and then we don’t hear from Miss Orcott or about this again until the end of the book.

Before long intrigue blooms when in one afternoon a gold rosary and two other students’ money go missing. What a scandal! “As long as every one of our class is in on the secret, I reckon we won’t have any trouble keeping it from the rest of the school,” Mary Ellis suggests with apparently genuine sincerity. Well, the mystery is solved by one of the students—not Mary Ellis—who would give Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple a run for her money. Now the book is half over and we only have 75 more pages to go.

As a second-year nursing student, Mary Ellis is the only person staffing an entire ward on the overnight shift. Astonishingly, the only “horrible experience” she has is when an elderly patient with a fatal disease dies and she does not realize this when she checks on him in the morning before going off duty. But time goes on, “gradually dulling her misery” over this terrible “mistake,” and soon we’re three-quarters through the book, when four new interns come to the hospital, and one of them, Dr. Harris, is Black! Which means that “each of the three colored girls was hoping that Dr. Harris would seek her out and ask her for a date.” That was how it was in the day, unbelievable as it is now.

Now we have a whirlwind of crises for Mary Ellis to right. It turns out the plastic surgeon Dr. Meyers and his wife are hoping to adopt a child but are considered too old. You will not be shocked to hear that Mary Ellis discovers a soon-to-be orphaned boy in the hospital; his mother has “an incurable disease” and “had not long to live.” She manages to rescue the boy, Sammy, when he nearly strangles on the restraining straps tying him to his crib (!!), and introduces Sammy to Dr. Meyers—a week later everything is all settled, and Mary Ellis then asks Dr. Meyers to have a look at Claudia’s nose, which apparently no one has bothered to do until now, though several discussions among the staff have occurred during the school year. All that remains is for Mary Ellis to wangle a date with Dr. Harris and pass her exams and we can close the book.

One of this book’s flaws is that it gets too heavily into details. For example, there’s a pages-long discussion of possible ways Claudia might first glimpse her new nose, and more pages discussing the machinations behind the organization of the Capping Ceremony; there are also more than 60 named characters to try (and fail) to keep track of (not to mention their nicknames). Furthermore, for a nursing student, we don’t see much of Mary Ellis outside the dormitory. She is constantly dwelling on the fact that her teachers tell her she is “not very hot in making decisions and that kind of thing.” But her daily life as a nursing student is almost completely ignored and we rarely ever see her at work, when she is either burning the toast or saving a toddler from strangulation. The fact that Mary Ellis is one of the first Black women accepted to her school and is likely subjected to racism is only rarely or tangentially discussed, and it seems that the author of this book was actually white. Author Rubie Saunders is widely (and as far as I can discover, appropriately) credited as being the first Black author of romance novels featuring a Black heroine, but here we have a curious example of a white author writing a Black heroine. I am curious to know how and why this book came about, but I’m guessing this mystery will never be answered; if only we could get Mary Ellis’ classmate on the case.

The Prodigal Nurse

By Teresa Hyde Phillips, ©1936 

Celia Landis looked across the dingy table at Tony Starr, whose fine surgeon’s hands were toying nervously with a coffee cup. “No, Tony,” she said slowly, “I’m not ready to be married yet. I … I haven’t really lived.” And Tony, who knew she was the best nurse St. Martha’s had ever had, smiled into her impetuous young eyes, and was silent, thinking, “You’ll be back soon enough!” So Celia tried life—a life not bounded by nurse’s rules or constant sacrifice, and with the help of suave Carlie Daklin she became the best photographer’s model in New York. But what of happiness? Celia had to choose between Carlie—her kind “angel” in this new and giddy world and Tony—the symbol of a life she had vowed to abandon. Which would it be?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“The only thing wrong with you is astigmatism.” 

“I have had dozens of nurses it seems to me in these last weeks and I had begun to believe that your profession begets none but worthy women who look like nothing but disasters on land and sea.”

“Women were such egotists, they thought that what they said and did and what happened to them mattered so much.”

“I’m a Harvard man. I wouldn’t get myself seriously shot outside a lady’s boudoir.”

“One’s mind said, ‘One must not think, nor remember, nor hope.’ Champagne said, ‘Leave that all to me.’”

“Character is a better bet than glamour any day.”

“Women have some silly romantic idea about surgeons. Completely uncalled for. They have a job, like the rest of us.”

“Men! They let you down. For chivalry, for kindness, you went to women.”

REVIEW:
Celia Landis is “twenty-one, beautiful and free!” She’s just graduated from nursing school, and Dr. Anthony Starr, right there on the first page, is “offering her the prisonhouse of marriage, proffering the ball and chain.” Good girl, she turns him down flat. “I don’t believe in marriage,” she says. “I don’t want to be tied down. I want to see things, to do things, to find out for myself. I want to be on my own.” The author, interestingly, doesn’t seem to be on the side of her heroine, as Dr. Starr, who “knew that only in bonds is there freedom,” is smiling condescendingly at Celia. 

It seems that Celia thinks she has made a mistake by becoming a nurse. She was forced into it when both her parents died her freshman year in college and there was no money to pay for her education. Now she has no other option but to work  to support herself, though she is not interested in dedicating her life, “as that of his wife must be, to illness” and is hoping to find another career option. “I’m not tough,” she tells him. “I want the beauty and the fun of life.” Of course, she is nonetheless “an exceptionally good nurse,” as VNRN heroines, reluctant though they may be, usually are.

She loses her first two cases because men in the house insist on forcing themselves on her, and the head of the nursing registry of course blames Celia for this. “If there was anything to be deplored in a nurse, it was beauty. Beauty. Detestable quality, leading only to trouble,” the woman thinks. In the depths of despair that she will never get another nursing job, Celia runs into Tony and his boss, Dr. Alderdice, and the pair take her to lunch. Afterward, as Celia tries to tell Tony about her fears, he dutifully proposes again, though Celia thinks he does not mean it and decides she’s not sure who he really is. “She felt that she no longer had any hold on him. None whatsoever.”

Then Carleton Daklin, the husband of one of her patients who had fired her, calls her up and offers her a modeling job. He is the head of an advertising agency and is looking for a nurse to pose in a series of ten ads for the National Hygiene Council, and the pay is $1,000—an enormous sum in the wake of the Great Depression, when a furnished two-bedroom apartment on East 43rd Street costs $120 a month. She takes the job, and when Tony calls her to say he’s taking a trip to the West Indies to do germ research, she tells him of her triumph. He is happy for her, but less so when he hangs up the phone, though he berates himself for his idiocy. “Had he for a minute thought she would say to him: ‘Tony, my darling, nothing that happens to me is of the slightest interest, there’s only you and your life.’” Now he is the one thinking he has lost Celia, but “he knew Celia, he thought, better than she knew herself.”

Then United Models calls, and soon the phone is ringing off the hook. Eventually Tony comes home and phones her, and he’s dismayed with her new life. “What had this girl thrown over? A real job, the greatest thing in the world—medicine,” he thinks, again frustrated that she did not ask him how his trip had gone. She goes out to dinner with Tony and enjoys his companionship, believes “there was no one like him, no one who could touch him in any way.” But he again sneers at her new profession with “amused malice” and tells her she should not have given up nursing so soon. “As a nurse, Celia Landis was a bust on her first two tries and only because she let herself think of herself as a bust,” he says. She is torn between her desire to live her own life and her attraction for him, but chooses the former, though she’s not certain for how long: “When she came to him she must come with everything—heart and mind and with every intent.”

When Tony walks her home, Carleton Daklin is waiting for her in her apartment—the first time Celia has seen him since he got her the modeling job—but Tony does not believe it and stomps out, and when Celia calls him to explain, he is cold. So she starts going places with Carleton, becoming the It Girl of Manhattan. “The emptiness Tony left was teaching her things. It was enlightening.” But one late-night party goes awry and a man is stabbed. Celia is the only one who can keep a cool head, not surprisingly, but the scandal lands her in the tabloids with a not-so-gentle assist from a couple other women in Celia’s circle who do not have her heart of gold—just as the sordid affair has made her realize she wants out of the glittering birdcage, the same day an offer to become chief nurse of the OR at the hospital where she trained arrives, which is withdrawn the next day. Tony runs to her house when he hears the news, but Celia, wounded to the core, can only snarl, “To tell me exactly what to do—is that your idea of friendship?” It’s more than a little true, but Tony says good bye and leaves, Celia thinks for good.

There are the usual crises before Celia is brought back to her man and nursing career, and if the ending wasn’t quite the complete perfection I wanted it to be, this is still a really lovely book. The writing in this book is sparkling: “Behold Miss Celia Landis, R.N., diploma summa cum laude, drilling through the traffic of Manhattan in a taxi which looked like any other taxi but which, if the world had eyes, was a jumping-off place from which one flung oneself into the fun of accomplishment.” It’s a thoughtful book full of philosophy about life and what is important, but not overly intellectual. It’s not hard to feel what the characters are going through, and how Celia has grown over the course of the book. If for most of this book she is not working as a nurse, she is still at heart a nurse throughout. My only real beef is that the ending does not clearly give Celia the strength she has earned from her experiences, and it’s not quite certain how she is going to live up to her new character. But that aside, this is a thoroughly delicious book, and if you can track down a copy for yourself, the effort will be worth it. 

Nurse in Danger

By Maisie Greig, ©1955

The steward laid a small table for them in the cabin and set silver and a pink-shaded lamp upon it: the white cloth reflected the soft light so that suddenly Jane felt she was in some exclusive nightclub. It really was very romantic. As the boat dipped gently she could see through the porthole the silver-crested waves, the moonlight cutting a path through the dark waters … but how could one feel romantic, when dining with a man who obviously intended to murder you at the first possible opportunity?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“You talk as though you were a Commie.” 

“If you don’t have a pretty fair opinion of yourself, what’s the good of going on living?”

“You have spunk, Jane, as well as a fertile imagination, and those qualities I admire in a woman. That and a nice little body.”

“You lack complete understanding of other women, Jane. They like to be hit about, they like to grovel. It’s the slave complex.”

“Perhaps in the last analysis you can take anything for yourself, it’s only when you see others punished and humiliated before your eyes you finally revolt.”

REVIEW:
Jane is another orphan nurse who has landed the lucky job of caring for a wildly wealthy young widow, Elsa Spiegal. Well, mostly she’s just a companion, but “in case she had another of those wretched heart attacks she wanted Jane to be along.” So Jane relocates from England and follows Elsa everywhere: “the Colony, Sardis, the Algonquin, the 21 Club.” And she’s hot, too! “She had slim and shapely legs, one of the reason many of the weary habitués of the Stork Club or the El Morocco half turned in their chairs and watched her samba.” Which unfortunately isn’t working out well: “That may have been one of the reasons why Mrs. Spiegal seemed to have turned rather cool towards her lately, almost to resent her.”

Or maybe it’s the fact that Professor Dick Creswell seems to like her. “Reputedly he was a mineralist and geologist of distinction,” but he had also inherited a lot of money and is hosting this fabulous party on his yacht. But instead of flirt with Dick, she is forced to listen to Mrs. Palmer cry, because her three-year-old was kidnapped more than two weeks ago, and no one at this silly party cares at all! They don’t: “We’re all very sorry for her and all that, but she is becoming a bit of a pest,” snorts Dick, earning his name. But Jane is able to shrug off his callousness and accompany him to his cabin where he shows Jane and Elsa his jewelry collection. Elsa, “reputed to have one of the finest collections of diamonds in the whole of the United States,” exhorts Dick to lend her a diamond watch for an exhibition, and then casually details her entire security arrangement, including the fact that Jane knows the combination to the safe and will be home alone for a week while Elsa is away. Now Jane demonstrates more sense, appreciating an “atmosphere she’d been conscious of when she’d first stepped on to the yacht, a disturbing, even a frightening undercurrent of suspicion, it might even be danger.” Well, we know it’s danger, since it says so right there on the cover!

She meets a young seaman on board who ridicules the other guests, pointing out their callousness toward others, Mrs. Porter being a case in point, and Jane reluctantly agrees—well, they’ve been so kind to her! He’s caught talking to Jane by Dick, who tells her that the man is an attempted thief whom he has hired in an attempt to set him on the straight and narrow with hard, honest work. Then he tells her that Elsa is wildly jealous because he is attracted to Jane and kisses her in the moonlight, the cad. Now the young innocent nurse is tortured about her own feelings for him, and his for her, when we savvy VNRN readers know the truth! Guess who enters Elsa’s apartment days later on the aforementioned day when Jane is there alone, sporting a small automatic pistol? He empties the safe, and kidnaps Jane, making it look like she herself was the thief. “Her only hope of fighting him was to pretend to acquiesce and, the chill though struck into her heart again, her only hope of living.” He drags her on board his yacht again, setting sail for who knows where? There she meets the sailor again, and he scorns her as a cheap tramp who has come on a cruise unchaperoned with a man she’s just met. She doesn’t dare to set him straight since Dick has suggested that she will “be a good girl” or be killed, and she interprets this as not telling anyone she’s a prisoner.

The seaman does warm to Jane, even kissing her before she even knows his name, and enlists her help in a scheme. He somehow manages to make Dick fall down a staircase, breaking his arm, and Jane injects him with some drug that knocks him out for 24 hours. While he’s out, she pokes around in his room and finds a child’s book that she recognizes as belonging to poor Mrs. Palmer’s kidnapped daughter Sally! Now we have question marks sprinkled across every page like ants at a picnic. They’re usually stupid questions Jane is asking herself repeatedly, though if she gave things an actual minute of thought she could likely figure out the answer. Now that Dick is her patient, though, he’s a lot more sympathetic toward her, and she convinces him that she’d been casing Mrs. Siegel’s jewelery collection a lot longer than he had, and he owes her half his profit from the heist. And it turns out that Jane is quite the actress! “He was beginning to be afraid that there might come a time when his emotions might interfere very seriously with his cool judgment” when it came to Jane.  Then she’s off to hide behind the life boats with Jaspar, kissing him “in the throes of her first big love affair.” That was fast! “They were in grave danger of their lives, but they were young and they were in love, and for that moment nothing else seemed to matter.”

We do get into some interesting philosophical discussions regarding wealth and its distributions, ideas that have more relevance in this day and age. “Why should a stupid woman like Elsa Spiegal have some of the world’s best jewels?” asks Dick. “What has she done to deserve them? What has she given to the world?” He, working as a professor, “contributed much to the world’s knowledge,” but had only a “pittance.” I have to admit I agree with his position—tax wealth, not work!

More philosophy ensues when a man is thought to have attempted to signal a passing ship, and Jaspar is ordered to throw the man overboard to the sharks. Now Jane is arguing with herself because she is still in love with Jaspar. “What a madly illogical thing love was,” she thinks. “Sometimes you hated yourself for living, and yet there it was, the strongest force in life that throbbed through your veins and blood. It couldn’t be killed by disillusion, however bitter; and while you despised yourself there was something in your heart that still sang with joy.” I don’t think love is quite as immortal as she would make out, otherwise the divorce rate might be a bit less than it is. But Jane seems to have some odd ideas about love; in the climax of the book Jaspar is rather vicious to several of the villains, but Jane decides that Jaspar is a “savage brute,” but “Savage brute or not, I’d die if I wasn’t going to be married to him!” He shows up at just that moment and she tells him she thinks he’s a brute, “and now hgis hard, blunt-fingered hands gripped Jane’s shoulders. ‘I’ll show you how much more of a brute I can be when I’m married to you, my girl,’” he answers, and shakes her. Stunningly, she neither runs screaming nor calls off the engagement, but says, “I don’t care if you beat me up every day, so long as you keep on loving me.” Just wow.

Overall the writing is engaging, though it does indulge in way too many rhetorical questions. The book’s biggest flaw is that Jane as a character is utterly bipolar. One minute she is coolly lying her head off to get out of a dangerous situation with the Professor, and then she’s shrieking hysterically during an escape in which the slightest sound could get them caught. Her over-the-top feeling for Jaspar based on a total of ten minutes in his company is completely unbelievable, and then when he is increasingly proved to be alarmingly domineering, her unswerving devotion to a future as an emotionally if not also physically abused wife is baffling. Author Maysie Greig’s lovely Doctor’s Wife had given me high hopes for her work, but now three additional books all written in the 1950s and lacking that book’s charm makes me think that early work, written in 1937, exhausted her genius. There seems to be another half-dozen nurse novels by Ms. Greig, so time will tell, but I’m not making any bets they’ll get much better.

Sharon Garrison, Clinic Nurse

By Phyllis Taylor Pianka, ©1977
Cover illustration by Edrien King

Young Sharon Garrison was eager to start work as head of the clinic at KSEA-TV Media Center. She would be responsible for the running of the entire clinic and the care of all those who worked at the center. Her association with Mercy Hospital had ended on a sour note, after her uncle Elliott Garrison had been named hospital administrator. Suddenly friends and acquaintances treated Sharon with exaggerated caution or as if she could directly influence hospital policy, and the young nurse had felt it best to look for a new position. At the Media Center, Sharon also hoped to gain some insight into her parents. Concert musicians, they had sent Sharon to boarding school and to live with her aunt and uncle rather than spending time with her. How could people be so absorbed with the entertainment industry that they neglected their own child? What was the fascination it held? Sharon quickly became involved in the center and caught up in its excitement. Charming and capable, she won the respect and affection of Skip Richardson, who was eager to give her a screen test, and Paul Hamilton, the handsome boss of KSEA-TV. And she even befriended the young picketer, Chuck Baker, who seemed to have a grudge against the station. Misunderstandings seem to be the rule rather than the exception in Sharon’s love life, however, and it is not until the exciting climax that the young nurse’s future seems certain.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Angel, you are darn late but you look good enough to get us off the hook. For once they sent me a body with class.”

“I guess they warned you this job isn’t likely to get very exciting. So far there haven’t been any murders, although when I see Sheila I am tempted.”

“‘Take it easy, Sharon. You look nervous. It isn’t as bad as you think it will be.’
“Sharon wrinkled her nose. ‘That’s what we tell our patients just before we give them a barium enema. They don’t believe us either.’” 

“I still think he will make the perfect husband once he is properly trained.”

REVIEW:
As Sharon Garrison enters the building of KSEA-TV in San Francisco for her first day as nurse in charge of the company clinic, she’s grabbed by the shoulders and whisked onto the elevator by Skip Richardson, who is in charge of casting for commercials. “This must be your first commercial,” he tells her. “I couldn’t have forgotten your packaging.” He picks up her hand to point out that she’s not wearing a wedding ring, too. Ha, ha, it’s a mistaken identity, quickly set to rights, and “Sharon had to smile in spite of herself. There was something appealing about the man despite his brashness.” She doesn’t mention how attractive his misogyny is.  

It seems to be epidemic in the company, unfortunately: If a show is successful they hang a toy elf in the cafeteria for a week and the girls are supposed to line up underneath it to be kissed by the boys. “All the pretty girls at the center have been kissed at least a dozen times,” explains casting director Skip Richards. Unfortunately, she accidentally walks under the elf when her boss Paul Hamilton is nearby, and though “the muscle in his jaw began to throb,” he just turns away and walks out of the cafeteria. Sharon is humiliated! “Why couldn’t he have kissed her?” she wonders. When he shows up at the clinic at the end of the day, she explodes: “You certainly succeeded in embarrassing me in front of the entire staff.” So he grabs her and kisses her: “His mouth was hard against hers; bruising, seeking, demanding, compelling.” She cries, he looks bewildered and forlorn, and “Sharon ached to reach out and hold him,” like anyone would after being assaulted.

Now “a series of minor accidents began to plague Media Center,” and the scuttlebutt is that it’s bad luck raining down after Paul refused to kiss Sharon under the elf. So Paul takes her to the cafeteria the next day, steers her under the elf, and kisses her “without haste, without passion.” Everyone in the cafeteria gives them a standing ovation. Take that, bad luck elf! Neither of them has time for a lengthy lunch, so they spend 90 minutes dining at a French restaurant, and Paul tells her he hasn’t wanted to date until the studio was successful. It is now, apparently, so he asks Sharon for a date. She suggests they go to Fisherman’s Wharf, which no actual San Franciscan ever goes near except on pain of death. Further demonstrating her complete lack of understanding of the city, for her date she wears a mini skirt and a sleeveless shirt, so she’s liable to freeze to death, the poor ignorant thing (it’s notoriously cold year-round in San Francisco; when I moved out of that city after living there for five years, I didn’t own a single pair of shorts).

Then Paul invites her to the house he’s just bought on the Pacific coast south of San Francisco. He tells her he’s in love with her and that she’s the first woman he’s brought there, but then she conveniently finds an ID bracelet with his secretary’s name on it on the walkway, and now she’s livid. Rather than discuss it with him, she tosses in bed all night, unable to sleep. “Well, for heaven’s sake, ask him to explain it,” says her sensible friend Kitty the next day. But before she has the chance, Paul finds out that she had wangled an audition for her nephews at the studio and is furious, thinking somehow that she’s compromised her employment with the company by pursuing nepotism. Now she’s hypocritical enough to insist that he listen to her explanation, but before they can get to that, someone with a bloody nose and then a crazy young man with a gun taking one of the studios hostage get in the way. You will easily guess how everything winds up from there.

It’s not the worst book ever, and in fact has a number of silly moments to laugh at—just not enough to put it over the top like the delightfully daffy Nurse at the Fair. The misogyny here is rather shocking even for VNRN standards—a mistletoe elf in the cafeteria???—but the writing is perfectly fine and the actual romance part is kind of sweet. Overall, however, even if it is set in San Francisco, the greatest city in the world, there’s just not enough that’s interesting about this book to make it a good read.

Runaway Nurse

By Doris Knight, ©1968 

An unexpected shock too great to bear sent Nurse Diane West on a frenzied escape. She stopped at a hospital in a small Arizona town and became a member of the staff at what could only be termed the most unusual hospital in the Southwest. She sought to bury herself in her work in order to forget what had happened. But there were too many things to remind her … And there was Jeff Brooks …

GRADE: C- 

BEST QUOTES:
“Well, if you’re going to be run over, I guess it’s better to be run over by a nurse.” 

“Hey, nurse. You’re not supposed to emote.”

“You’re a beautiful girl. I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have run me over.”

REVIEW:
As we open Runaway Nurse, Diane West RN has been saved from being a child bride (she’s 22) as her fiancé and her sister had eloped to Las Vegas the night before her wedding. She’s also saved from having wasted all that money going to nursing school, as though she had insisted on finishing her training, her fiancé had demanded that “she was not to practice once they were married.” Instead of being grateful for her near miss, however, she’s leaving town, “driving too fast” to “escape the tears she had yet to shed.” She’s lucky she did insist on graduating, as now she has a profession that can support her, but doesn’t seem to see it that way: “Was she wrong to consider her nursing education over Tony’s”—ahem—“interests?” 

The wild driving leads to tragedy—she hits Jeff Brooks, who is standing in the middle of the road in the Arizona desert in the middle of the night. His fibula is broken and he’s been rendered unconscious for an unusually long period of time, but the next morning he wakes up and drags himself into the back seat of Diane’s car. It turns out they are both headed for El Sol Hospital in Cactus City—she to try to claim a job offer she had turned down, and he because he is “hoping to be a patient.” “Knowing El Sol Hospital had its major section devoted to the treatment of mental and emotional disorders,” Diane is a little wary.

El Sol is an architectural masterpiece rising five stories above the surrounding shanties, with a liveried doorman to boot. She has absolutely no idea what the job entails, and is shocked to discover that the patients are “neurotics mostly, with a large variety of hangups.” It doesn’t take her long to get on the wrong foot, as she tells the charge nurse that she doesn’t think her alcoholic patient is “getting the proper therapy,” which in this case is enough barbiturates to make her lethargic. The mean old head nurse, Miss Marcy—whom Diane maturely refers to as Stoneface—reports Diane to hospital chief Dr. Wallace, because “the doctors know best about the medication,” she says—clearly never having worked a day in a hospital in her life. Diane is called to an informal hearing for “a breach of professional ethics,” but manages to hold onto her job despite Miss Marcy’s recommendation that she be fired.

Miss Marcy doesn’t take this well and accuses Diane of having an affair with Jeff. Well, she is visiting Jeff Brooks on a daily basis, and he “continued to make overtures to her,” calls her “doll face” and tries to kiss her “clumsily because of his immobilizing cast.” Jeff laughs it off when she tells him about the accusation. “Diane, baby,” he says, “you’re such an iceberg that certainly no one will give it a second thought.” He follows this flattering remark by telling her, “You have really knocked me cold.” Diane, though she calls this treatment “kind,” is permanently scarred by being dumped and can’t respond warmly to him. Instead she points out that he has refused to be discharged from the hospital, which was recommended a week ago, and tells him she will not visit him any longer (though she keeps dropping by anyway). He responds by declaring she should quit the hospital, but won’t explain why. He is eventually thrown out, kicking and screaming, and she is shocked and outraged when he grabs her, tells her he loves her, and kisses her goodbye—“right in front of everyone!”

Diane receives a letter from Jeff again imploring her to leave the hospital, which she ignores, but the next day she is called to Dr. Wallace’s office and accused of having a relationship with Jeff and summarily fired. So now she decides to head home, and once there she discovers a big scandal has erupted at the hospital, with the local paper accusing it of fraud—and guess who the reporter is! Diane is outraged: “Jeff had lied to her and pretended to be something he wasn’t,” she decides. “He used me. And he allowed all this trouble to come to me. It’s his fault!” This attitude is a bit surprising, since he didn’t exactly jump in front of her car, he didn’t encourage her to challenge the doctors about their treatment plans, and one might understand that spilling his secrets to a woman he’d just met is a bit risky if a major project that could make the world a better place hangs in the balance.

Fortunately her mother has more sense. “You must grow up,” says Mom. “You are showing a lack of maturity that disappoints me.” Ouch! But needless to say, Mom’s tough love does not work, and her parents are left just hoping “she would not make another rash decision.” Well, she and Jeff both do—he proposes on their first date and she accepts, so I assume their marriage will be equally stupid.

Diane is colossally immature, from her first decision to blow town to the very end of the book, and she shows no evidence whatsoever of growth. It’s interesting to me that the author can see this, as she has Diane’s mother try to talk some sense into her, but does not give Diane any sort of awakening. Diane’s hypocrisy is also bewildering, as it’s hard to understand how she can have the gumption to stand up to the doctors about the patients’ medication, but at the same time thinks, “I must learn not to be such a rebel. Perhaps my independent spirit and rebelliousness are what caused Tony to leave me for my sister.” Jeff is kind of an ass too, so it’s not at all clear why anyone would go for him, even a moron like Diane. She can’t even pull off running away, as she’s back living with her parents at book’s end. You can do better, I’m sure—run away from this book.

Nurse Kay’s Conquest

By Willo Davis Roberts, ©1966 

Armed with their shining diplomas, Nurses Kay Regis and Ginny Attison were out to set the California town of Mayerling on its ear. Kay was well aware that her best friend possessed more than enough charms and feminine wiles to capture the hearts of the two bachelor-doctors in town. And she was almost willing to let Ginny have the run of the mill—until her own emotions caught up with her and drew her irresistably into the arms of the one man she was fighting to ignore.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Kay, darling, you aren’t working at it. Smile. Not a perfunctory little smile but seductive. Manage to touch shoulders or hands when you work with him. The electricity will get through to him sooner or later. No man could look like that and be completely impervious to a pretty girl.”

“The only way he’ll ever see me will be if I have my gallbladder removed, and then he’ll only notice my insides.”

“My father always told me never to look a gift horse in the mouth. When I got older, I realized that this also applied to pretty girls in my kitchen at midnight.”

“I may do favors for old ladies, but any kissing I do is strictly on my own.”

REVIEW:
Kay Regis and Ginny Attison, new grads from nursing school, are moving to Ginny’s hometown of Mayerling, in the central valley of California. They’re moving in with Ginny’s 60-year-old grandmother and working at a 60-bed hospital which has at most four nurses on per shift, covering maternity, pediatrics, med/surg and ED, and sometimes no doctors at all in the hospital or ED—clearly a malpractice suit waiting to happen. They being new grads and all, and no MDs in the building, perhaps it’s not surprising that the first thing they do when three patients who had been in a car crash, one of whom is unconscious with a severe head wound and another who may be paralyzed, is clean them up, flirt with the ambulance drivers, and fill out forms.

Fortunately Dr. Ross arrives. “What’s all the yakkety-yak? Is anybody doing anything for these kids?” It’s a valid question, but the doctor doesn’t do much either, apart from x-raying the possibly paralyzed man; the unconscious kid doesn’t seem to have gotten any imaging studies at all. The best news is that there are two single doctors, Dr. Ross and Dr. Hugh Shand, so Kay and Ginny can each can have one. Dr. Hugh Shand is “such a perfectionist it seems no once can please him,” which is demonstrated by the fact that he is chewing out the nursing supervisor when they see him for the first time, and “looked through them as if they were so many posts holding up the ceiling.” But he is also “tall, dark and fabulous,” and “the best doctor in town, no matter what else they say about him”—and he drives a cream-colored Lincoln Continental, so maybe that’s why “something about him sent a tremor through Kay’s body even as she backed out of his way.” That night, “the face of Dr. Hugh Shand floated before her in the darkness for some time before she finally fell asleep.” Nothing is sexier to a nurse novel heroine than an aloof, shouting man who doesn’t notice you. “So much for that seductive smile. He wouldn’t notice me if I batted my eyes six inches from his face,” she thinks.

Meanwhile, the granddaughter of wealthy Rhoda Mayerling, who endows the hospital, is admitted to the hospital in a coma after being hit by a car. Rhoda blames her daughter-in-law Beverlee for the death of her son; they had been driving home drunk and she had thought there was an oncoming car, grabbed the wheel, and the car had driven into a concrete wall, killing Richard—but the other car had been parked by the road, not a danger to them. Beverlee feels she is too stupid to take up a profession, so she is trapped living with Rhoda, who enjoys keeping the woman on a short leash. Now Rhoda blames Beverlee for stealing a $4,000 necklace she had stupidly given the comatose girl to hold, which has gone missing.

Then Ginny’s grandmother sets up Kay on a date with Hugh Shand. Kay is furious at the woman for meddling, and humiliated—a bizarre reaction in this day and age—because Hugh was pushed into dating her and did not ask her himself. They both seem to have a great time, but Kay can’t be content with that: “Had all of it, the laughter, the excitement of their contact, the fun of dancing, been simply that—obedience to the wishes of a rich old lady?” But the old witch wasn’t completely wrong, because by the end of the night they’re in each others’ arms, talking—hypothetically, anyway—about marriage.

This is only about two-thirds through the book, though, so we have a significant page count—and the foreshadowing line, “How wrong a girl could sometimes be”—to predict that trouble is a-brewing. Sure enough, when Beverlee gets a job in a dress shop and moves out of Rhoda’s house to live with Charlotte independently on her own earnings, Hugh becomes outraged, accuses Kay of interfering, though she has done nothing but listen to Beverlee’s plans and bolster the poor abused woman’s confidence, and calls Kay a half-witted idiot and Beverlee “an empty-headed, immature, thirty-year-old teenager who lives for nothing but pleasure. She has never done a useful thing in her life except perhaps give birth to Charlie, and that was probably an accident.” Wow! When Kay points out that Rhoda is cruel to Beverlee, Hugh’s only defense is that Rhoda has terminal cancer and “can’t live without Charlotte.” Kay rightly ends it with Hugh, thinking, “she could never marry a man who expected her to yield to his opinion on everything, no matter what her own conscience dictated.”

There’s a house fire to help put things to rights, sort of, though Hugh never acknowledges that he has been prejudiced and wrong about Beverlee’s character and Rhoda’s treatment of her, and the question of whether he wants a yes-man or a strong woman for a wife remains unanswered. The writing isn’t terrible, though the plot is a bit thin, and the central question of whether Kay and Hugh will work out in the end is not satisfactorily answered at the end of the book. If Nurse Kay has made a conquest of Hugh, author Willo Davis Roberts, who has not been a particular favorite of mine in the past, has not made a conquest of me with yet another mediocre book. I suspect you won’t be impressed, either.

Nurse Brookes

By Kate Norway
(pseud. Olive Norton), ©1957
Also published as Sister Brookes of Byng’s 

Helen  Brookes had left Byng’s Hospital to get married … and come back again, her engagement broken. She had made one distressing, almost disastrous mistake; now she would be more careful, she told herself, more clear-headed about her own emotions. All of which did not prevent her from falling in love with a surgeon who, it seemed, was not free to marry.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“The way she used her lashes was cheap.” 

“Doctors are annoying creatures, and students are worse.”

“Sorry? The most incompetent word in the language.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Helen Brookes is a sister—which means she’s in the nurse in charge—of the men’s surgical ward at Byng’s Hospital in England. She’s a highly capable and kind nurse, always sticking up for the underdog, setting to rights the young probationers who seem like they can never do anything at all when they start their training and turning them into first-rate nurses, even match-making for her ex-fiancé, a nice man whom she never really loved and who never really loved her, with the woman he actually pines for. 

She meets Dr. Hugh Burton-Hall, the resident surgical officer, who is a blunt, brusque man slow to warm, but warm he does indeed, as we know he will. The big hitch is that he has a son, and presumably a wife. Of course, we know there’s more to the story than that, but Helen Brookes, who otherwise can overcome hospital gossip in a single bound, bend recalcitrant patients to her will, and even cure cancer patients is strangely unable to see the obvious. So most of the book involves a lot of stories about the more than 60 other named characters in the book—I tell you, it is a serious chore trying to keep everyone straight—while we wait for the star-crossed lovers to sort things out. And that’s about all I have to say about this book.

I am a fan of Olive Norton, who topped the Best Authors list in 2021 with an almost-B+ average across seven books, but this story is not her finest. It’s not unpleasant, just maybe a little boring, without much plot to be had. You can certainly do worse, but unless you’re desperate, there’s really not much of a reason to read this book.