Camp Nurse

By Kathleen Harris
(pseud. Adelaide Humphries Rowe), ©1961

Offered the position as a nurse at a boys’ camp, in the Catskills, young and beautiful Tanis Thaler accepted reality. However, she was told to look less attractive so that none of the older boys would fall in love with her. Tanis finds a real challenge in being a camp nurse. There are fifty boys to look after and two in particular present real problems to her as a nurse. But as a lovely young woman, she has an even greater problem. Because she must dress and act like a dowdy spinster, the handsome athletic director, Jim Nielson, whom she has grown to love with all her heart, treats her like a sister … 

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Mrs. Carson’s in number three, all ready for you, Doctor—and she can’t leave until I give her back her shoes and girdle.” 

“What age is an unimpressionable one?”

“She ought to be able to walk back alone. It was not yet dark; and it wasn’t far. But there might be snakes.”

“There was no sense in a girl hiding her legs, especially when they were nice legs.”

REVIEW
“How would you like to take a leave of absence from the office and spend the summer in the Catskills?” said no doctor, ever, to the most dependable staff nurse in their busy surgical practice. So right out of the gate we know we are in for an unbelievable story. Tanis Thaler, recovering from an open appendectomy weeks ago, is apparently not yet fit to go back to work, so her boss decides that sending her to work at a boys’ camp for the summer would be an awesome way for her to get her strength back, because 50 boys would be so easy to wrangle! There’s just one problem: Tanis is just so gosh-darned beautiful that it would be a huge distraction to the impressionable young men. “Try to make yourself look a bit more—severe,” Dr. Wedner tells her, so she shops for dark, heavy glasses, oversized uniforms that “would not accentuate any curves and were too long to show off to advantage of a nicely turned calf. Tanis thought she would look positively dowdy.” 

And what success she has! When on the train she meets Jim Neilson, a stunningly handsome man, he looks her over lustily not at all, instead feeling sorry for the “timid soul, the born-to-remain-unwed type,” whom “no man could possibly be attracted to.” And so he condescends to be “exasperatingly polite” to Tanis for most of the book. In his thoughts, however, he is downright rude, wondering “what the heck was wrong with this girl’s legs that she wore her dresses so long,” and “what was the big idea, anyway—going around looking like a frump,” as if her attire is an affront to his personal dignity.

Fortunately for Tanis’ future marriage prospects, she also has Perry Davis, another camp counselor, who “liked to brag about his conquests with women”; faced with the prospect of a summer in a camp with only one unmarried woman, Perry is determined to make the best of a bad lot. “When marooned on a desert island a guy had to take what was at hand,” because “it couldn’t be that he was interested in a girl who looked as she did, although he had paid her the compliment of saying that she had a fine mind” after their discussion about Krushchev’s speech at the UN summit meeting. Of course, Tanis thinks, “no girl in her right mind wanted to be complimented merely on that score,” but Perry soon realizes she’s a knockout after he’s forcibly kissed her and knocked off her glasses in the process. “Next time I kiss you, it won’t be just because you’re a girl,” the flatterer declares and proposes, because though he has never been interested in getting married, “if he ever did decide to settle down, however, it might be good to settle for a nurse—they earned a good salary.” He then advises Tanis he won’t give her secret away. “Why, if Jim, for instance, knew what a dreamboat you are, he’d try to impress you with all that brawn of his!”

You can’t have 50 boys in a book without some of them being bad seeds, and if the book is set 60 years ago, the toughs are going to have adorably silly names like Stinker. “Scrapper” Donahue is a bully who goes around beating up the little kids and taking their lunch money, causing Tanis to go full-bore guilt trip on the unsuspecting kid. When she catches him pounding little Timmy Parkinson to make him say “uncle,” she scolds him that he should find something better to do with his time. “If you mean a four-eyed dame like you, I’ve got no time to waste on chicks,” retorts Scrapper, instantly winning my affection. Tanis lets this go by and instead delivers some sappy lines like how everyone would admire and look up to him if he weren’t such an asshole. “I’m sure that Timmy—and lots of the others—would, if you’d only let them,” she tells him, and Timmy, true champion that he is, manages not to throw up on her shoes.

Another young camper, Stewart, comes from a “broken home,” and is “over-sensitive—and exceptionally brilliant, moody, unresponsive,” and 17 years old, the perfect target for Tanis. “She had been wondering how to ‘reach’ him—get him to confide in her,” though what she wants to know about is not clear. Ironically, after all the emphasis on Tanis’s looks, when Stewart comes down with mumps (one of two vaccine-preventable illnesses the camp is overrun with this summer), she tells him, “It’s you I like, Stewart—not the way you look.” Stewart, at least, is the only guy in the camp who falls for Tanis exactly as she appears. “It did not matter that Tanis was not pretty by accepted standards. What did matter was that he could talk to her and she listened and understood; that she believed in him. He would never ask for anything more. All he wanted was for this—and Tanis—never to change.” Honestly, Tanis should be chasing Stewart, the only good man in the book.

Tanis attempts to get Jim to let Timmy out of sports essentially because he’s a wimp, but after finding out that Timmy is not “a bit mixed-up”—could this be a euphemism?—Jim won’t hear of it, telling her that if the other boys duck him in the pond, it’s all in fun. “In order to become a man, a boy has to learn to take it,” he says. It’s an alarming point of view, but he does note that you can’t win if you don’t play, and that “a man doesn’t have to excel at any sport, but he does have to learn to stand on his own two feet.” This is actually a valid point of view, coping skills being essential to surviving life, but Tanis fights it in her own weird way, getting Timmy out of sports by tucking him into a cot in the infirmary, and then leaving him there alone all night, possibly because a boy has to learn to take it? After Jim refuses to baby Timmy, Tanis decides Jim is “stubborn, opinionated, and egotistical. No longer could he seem too attractive to her”—because for one brief moment, a character’s physical appearance is not the major factor in whether a person is beautiful to another. Don’t worry, it won’t last. 

Perry eventually sort of proposes to Tanis, telling her to “name the day,” which she does not do—so therefore in her mind they are not engaged, while in Perry’s they are. She acknowledges to herself that she is essentially playing a rotten game with Perry because she’s tired of not having anyone chase her for the summer. “She had only encouraged him because her feminine pride had demanded some masculine recognition—and yes, to be honest, because she had been hurt when Jim had not given her any,” the second part of her nefarious plan being to “jolt” Jim into paying attention to her. “If he didn’t—well, what difference would it make if she were engaged to Perry—or even if, eventually, she decided to marry him?” Seems to me it might make an incredibly enormous difference, and not to mention it’s a really sick game to play.

Tanis also gradually starts shedding her “disguise,” wearing shorts and dumping the glasses, and it works! Jim, appreciating her new look, thinks, “She seemed to be an entirely different person. Not the strait-laced, mousey type of girl he had imagined, but a girl any man would notice.” So Tanis dumps Perry, who immediately picks up on the real reason she had been seeing him: “You wanted to make Jim jealous. Like all the girls, you go for all that brawn and muscle. I suppose you’d marry a guy like him in a second if he asked you.” Because it’s not the person he is—which is not in any way attractive—that’s important, it’s how he looks. And guess what? When, on the last night of camp, she dresses up in pumps and a dress that doesn’t hide her knees for the big send-off dinner, Jim grabs her arm and pulls her off to dinner at an outside restaurant without even asking her, and tells her, “I wouldn’t let you marry Perry if I had to marry you myself”—high motivation indeed—well, that’s all it takes for Tanis!

This is the book’s enormous contradiction. Author Adelaide Humphries (here writing as Kathleen Harris), as often as she has Tanis mouthing words about how it’s who you are that matters, not how you look, the book’s plot clearly demonstrates she doesn’t actually believe that to be true. Jim has not been in any way kind to Tanis all summer, so her realization in the last pages of the book that she is in love with Jim seems to prove Perry entirely correct: Jim’s only redeeming features are his good looks and his killer body. As for Jim, the first time Jim pays anything other than stiffly polite attention to her is when she’s wearing nylons, so his interest in her is equally shallow. The only person in the book with a genuinely honorable character is 17-year-old Stewart, so the moral of the story seems to be that it’s up to the younger generation to save the world. Good luck, Stewart, you’ve got a big job on your hands!

Soul Nurse

By Rose Dana
(pseud. William Daniel Ross), ©1970 

Sally Hughes, R.N., had a nurse’s dream come true at Canton General. Her boss was the brilliant chief surgeon, Dr. Stan Thorne. She was respected for her dedication, talent and poise. And two men loved her—the bitter but handsome Dr. Jim Dawson and Stan himself. But Stan was white. Could Sally, a black girl, even hope to surmount the difficulties their love presented in the small New England town? Perhaps she would find a way … then tragedy struck. Canton’s mayor is mysteriously stabbed, a black person is unjustly accused and Sally faces a desperate choice—one that involves not only her man but the meaning of her life. 

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“It’s fortunate the doctor also happens to be adept with a knife.” 

“You’re not the least female in that respect. Your punctuality constantly amazes me.”

“It was those who clung most precariously to a rung of the status ladder who refused to make a break with the pat order of things.”

“You need a steady hand for that brain tumor today.”

“Isn’t that the goal of most of the people these days? They want drugs to make everything seem rosy from the cradle to the grave. It’s no longer fashionable to try and change things. You just take drugs so you won’t notice them.”

“Like a scalpel frankness should be used only by skilled hands, otherwise it can work great havoc.”

“Interns devour little girls like you. You be careful with them.”

“Don’t be so bitter. You’re much too pretty.”

“Loud talk brings on more loud talk.”

REVIEW:
A nurse romance novel, which necessarily delves into the life of a woman, is always a little problematic when written by a man. A nurse novel about a Black nurse is especially unfortunate when it’s written by a white man, and I’ll admit I am even more wary when the author in question is one I’ve never liked, here William Daniel Ross writing under one of his many pseudonyms, who has earned only a C+ average across 16 reviews. And perhaps not surprisingly, this book is somewhat problematic—yet not nearly as bad as I had feared it would be, so that’s a win. 

Sally Hughes is a Black scrub nurse working at Canton General Hospital in New Hampshire’s “largest seacoast city,” which at the time when this book was written was Portsmouth. (I have to state that I once lived in Portsmouth, so I have some expertise regarding this setting.) Sally works alongside Dr. Stan Thorpe, who lost his wife to breast cancer three years ago, leaving him with a now-15-year-old daughter Karen, with whom Sally is especially close and sees regularly. Stan also has fond feelings for Sally, and repeatedly pleads with her to marry him, but though she “perhaps even loved” Stan, she is constantly talking herself out of a relationship with him entirely on racial grounds. “What would be the community’s reaction? Would it harm his career?” she worries and considers, “There were things she and Dr. Stan Thorpe would never be able to share, points of view, emotional feelings about remembered days long past, pride of race and color.” She seldom gives any thought about whether being with Stan and Karen makes her happy—which obviously it does, as she spends an enormous amount of time with them. “It was useless to pretend that being with Stan Thorpe and Karne didn’t mean anything to her. Probably she gained a great deal more from it than they did. For just a short time she was allowed to feel part of a family unit.”

There’s another man in her orbit, Dr. Jim Dawson. “It was only natural that they should be attracted to each other,” we are told, but it isn’t until 18 pages later that we learn that Jim is Black, which I guess is supposed to be the reason why their attraction is “natural”—in the same way it’s natural for every white woman to be attracted to every white man? Jim is an exceptionally talented doctor who has built up a good practice in this predominantly white community, a fact that is repeated often with a tinge of surprise. Jim is described as the stereotypical angry Black man barely under control: “Sally was fearful for him. She knew better than most of the others that beneath his calm professional exterior and mocking, sometimes bitter humor there was an explosive temper. Although now it was carefully controlled, the day might come when some insignificant incident might be enough to touch it off.”

Well, you can be sure something happens, but it’s not insignificant. First the mayor is stabbed in his own driveway—saved in the OR by Dr. Stan Thorpe and his right-hand gal Sally—but the mayor has a slimy colleague, Sam Grayson, who is intent on promoting the idea that the perpetrator was a Black man from Boston—he even uses the N-word—though the mayor declares he never saw his assailant, and there’s not even any evidence outside of Sam’s say-so that any Boston Blacks were in town that night.

Then it is announced that a new “cut off” to Interstate 95 is planned—and it will be passing directly through Blair Settlement, a neighborhood of 150 families. (The actual number of Black people living in Portsmouth in 1970 was about 116, or about 0.4% of the total population, so the book’s number is wildly unrealistic, as is the idea that Route 95 would need an additional on-ramp in this fairly rural community.) But the impending destruction of the neighborhood sends Jim into a fury. Sally tries to assuage Jim repeatedly that “it may not be as bad as it seems,” because “she knew it was going to take a great deal of patience and tact to save this man she was so fond of from taking a big leap into trouble and destroying his career.”

Jim is having none of it, and repeatedly insults Sally, telling her, “I can do without your well-integrated caution,” and calling her a “turncoat,” a “would-be Delilah” who has “lost her identity.” He’s bringing in a big-time organizer from a Black Power group to speak at a meeting he’s calling to protest the plans, and Sally is afraid the move will end in violence, and that general opposition to the project—currently pretty high, according to hospital gossip—will evaporate. Soon Jim is getting hate calls in his office, and he’s decided to leave the area for a big city. “People here only want me around when they’re too sick to think of anything but their own white skin. Well, I won’t be at their beck and call. I’m leaving,” he announces, forgetting that all doctors are “called” by their patients when they’re ill. He wants Sally to come with him, but she’s not sure: “I’d be afraid of being tainted by your twisted thinking, by your stupid hates. Emotional illness is sometimes like physical sickness—it can be catching,” she tells him.

Not only is Jim just endlessly mean to Sally, he never overtly proposes to her, never speaks of any feeling for her other than disgust at her position, only asking her to “go with me” when he leaves town. Stan, on the other hand, speaks often and freely of his love for Sally. “You’ve made life bearable for me again,” he tells her. “I’d still be lost without you. Any time I lose you I’ll suffer. I’m in love with you. We’re ideally suited. I’ll keep on asking you to marry me until you say yes.” When she tells him, “It would be a nightmare. I’m positive it would,” he answers, “If you’re trying to say we are not suited because of race or color, that’s sheer nonsense. I’m in love with you.”

The big town meeting comes to pass, but Sally does not attend, choosing instead to spend the evening at Stan and Karen’s house. The meeting turns out to be a complete bust when the organizer—himself a racist; he tells Sally, “I’m not sure I know any decent white people”—“started ranting about everything under the sun,” Jim tells Sally. “He rambled and raged so that he left the Blair Settlement crowd bewildered.” In the end Jim had stepped up and explained that he was hoping to send a petition to the governor, but by that time the fiery rhetoric had lost some of the crowd. Ultimately the neighborhood is saved—but only for the most banal of reasons, budget. “They’ve made a lot of other cuts in their highway budget but that’s the main one,” we are told. Sally continues to insist that bigotry “doesn’t represent the feelings of most Canton people,” but Jim can’t believe that and is determined to leave town. He also has lost interest in Sally, it seems: “Jim Dawson had stopped proposing to her some time ago. He’d even suggested she marry Stan.”

There’s a lot to think about with this book. Is Sally’s preferred method of just talking to people the best way to save the neighborhood? She explains to a friendly fellow nurse, a white woman who has pointed out that the Black families would have been financially compensated for their loss, that it’s hard for Black people to buy homes because they might not be welcome or may not be able to afford a different home, and the nurse “looked embarrassed. ‘I see now it’s not a simple problem of selling homes and buying other ones. I didn’t really understand what it was all about,’” she says, showing that white people in town are reasonable, if ignorant of the realities of Black lives.

On the other hand, the other extreme of the Black organizer being too radical for a small-town New Hampshire crowd is too pat and seems like a cop out—one has to ask if it was the author’s racially motivated fear that inspired this plot turn. Dodging a real discussion of Jim and Sally’s preferred tactics (though Sally’s is tacitly endorsed as she wins over her work colleagues and roommates with conversation) is lazy, and the medium path of Martin Luther King’s peaceful marches is never entertained, nor is the obvious outreach to the general public through the press or general meetings or a door-to-door campaign. I did appreciate that in her daily life Sally repeatedly and calmly faces down racism with smart retorts, but in the end, her strength isn’t enough to keep me from feeling that this white male Canadian author demonstrates a clear bias writing about a female Black American and her struggles for racial equality. I saw this when the characters’ attempts at strong advocacy were made such a complete failure, and when the people who actually saved the neighborhood were not its residents but faceless bureaucrats without feeling for the problem or the potentially dehoused locals. Even Sally’s totally bewildering final decision about her love life is suspect, and I have zero hope that she will ultimately be happy by choosing the then-culturally accepted path instead of following her heart and going with the right (white) man. I’m going to suggest, though, that it doesn’t mean this book isn’t worth reading. Overall the writing and characters (aside from reactionary Jim) are good, and it’s always important to be able to spot the flaws in writing and thinking, especially when it comes to prejudice. As bigotry becomes more subtle (granted less so recently), it takes more skill to see it, and this book offers opportunity to hone your skills. 

Crusading Nurse

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

Susan Leighton was a pretty young nurse and as innocent as they come. She had no idea what was going on at Parsons Community Hospital, even though the newspapers hinted at mismanagement and malpractice. It was handsome Dr Corbett who opened her eyes—who set her off on a lonely crusade against some powerful enemies, and a shattering struggle against the man she loved.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Any time that beautiful hunk of man wants to breathe down my neck, he’ll get a warm welcome.” 

“Is that passion or asthma?”

“Nobody’s ever going to like you less for saying you’re sorry.”

“How can a man that handsome be that irritating?”

REVIEW:
Susan Leighton is admittedly not the strongest nurse on my bookshelf. She took her training at a “small and not highly accredited” school that had “left innumerable blanks in her education,” and after arriving in Parsons, IL, to work at the community hospital there, she remains insecure about her ability. She’s been reading her textbooks at night because, she tells hospital board President Eugene Kalb, “I’m so terribly conscious of the responsibility a nurse takes on. I actually get cold chills, sometimes, realizing that a child’s life may depend on my doing the right thing. I want to be sure I haven’t forgotten anything I learned in pediatrics.” Her temerity leads her to be overmuch “in awe of the hospital and the people who ran it,” overly impressed that “everyone’s so—so dedicated.” When Eugene complains that reporter Mike Stetson is rooting around the hospital for any evidence that the facility’s practices are subpar, on the heels of stories the newspaper has published about graft in the city government, the administrator candidly admits that there is “a little hanky-panky going on” at City Hall, but there’s none at the hospital! Susan just nods and smiles.

On the job, her colleague, Tenny Williams, a longtime and highly experienced nurse, voices concerns about safety practices—there’s only one nurse covering the night shift on the newborn nursery, which can hold up to 25 babies. “Susan frowned, wishing Tenny would stop involving her in matters that weren’t the concern of ordinary employees. She felt a queasy sense of disloyalty, questioning the decisions of her superiors.” Because it’s not her concern if she is responsible so many patients that they are in danger.

Then Dr. Dale Corbett turns up on the premises. He wanders around asking the staff a lot of questions about how the hospital is run, and it’s revealed that he’s from Boston and is working on a paper evaluating hospital safety. He eventually wanders into the nursery and starts asking Susan questions about her work. “It’s less taxing and it’s sort of fun,” she says, explaining why she likes working in the nursery. Possibly amused by how adorable this answer is, he then asks her if she is aware that two-thirds of infant mortality occurs in the first week of life and what she knows about erythroblastosis fetalis (aka Rh factor incompatibility) which one infant on the nursery suffers from, and she is forced to confess her ignorance. Despite her initial claims that she worries about being a conscientious and knowledgeable nurse, now she is “resentful of what seemed to be a petty inquisition” rather than horrified at her ignorance and dashing back to her textbooks.  But she can’t help panting when he’s around, soon deciding after having lunch with him in the cafeteria that she is falling in love with him.

It’s not going to be an easy relationship, though, as she asks Dale why he isn’t “really serving humanity” by opening a medical practice instead of scrutinizing hospital policy. “Because maybe I’ll be forced to take patients to a hospital that kills instead of cures,” he answers—and she responds by again relentlessly and naively defending the hospital. After a couple of dates they finally kiss, and he proposes on the spot. Susan wisely answers that they should get to know each other better, but after he bizarrely stiffens up and leaves, Susan reverses course and decides, “They had disagreed on an important issue, they had known each other only a short time, they were virtually strangers. None of that mattered! Love was enough.” Of course, the question of whether it can really be love after just two dates is not asked.

The next day at work, everything should be bliss, but that darned Dr. Corbett shows up in the pediatrics ward where one child has a postop Staph infection after a tonsillectomy, and he asks why no one is taking infection precautions such as gowning and gloving and handwashing before and after seeing the patient. “Smugly, identifying herself firmly with the medical staff,” Susan declares, “Why, the laundry bill, if we put on and discarded a gown every time we go into this room, would be staggering.” Then, when Dr. Corbett points out a chain of medical errors and prevents Susan from delivering a major overdose to a patient, she snaps, “You’ve managed to unnerve everybody who works here. We’re all so nervous, we’re making mistakes because of you! All I know is that we were getting along very well without your constant sniping. We were doing a good job.” Her ignorance is colossally staggering, but more so is her arrogant conviction that she, a self-admittedly poorly trained nurse in her first weeks on the job, knows more than a doctor about management of a serious infection. I really can’t imagine why her alarming blindness does not turn Dr. Corbett off completely, as it seems to indicate a serious character flaw.

On her way out of the hospital, Susan runs into Eugene Kalb in the hallway. He starts to gripe about Dr. Corbett, and she, shaken by what might have been a fatal error, tells him there might be room for improvement in an organization as large as this one. He snaps, “You have to align yourself either with people who have worked hard to make this hospital a reality or with those whose object seems to be to tear it down.” Suddenly she sees “in Eugene’s ethic there were no patients whose lives depended on your skill and knowledge and compassion. There were only customers, from whom a specified sum was to be extracted.” Then, meeting with the hospital head nurse to confess her error, she catches the woman in a weak moment and she confirms of all Dr. Corbett’s insinuations—that the hospital is “a disgrace to the profession and a threat to this community,” that a number of patients have died or been injured due to shoddy practices.

Now Susan is all afire to save the hospital and decides to get all the hospital employees to start making suggestions about how their practices can be improved—and gets nothing but cold stares from her coworkers when she suggests it. And that’s the end of that—because the pediatrics ward’s lack of precautions with a highly infectious patient have resulted in a hospital-wide outbreak of Staph infections, and finally everyone is on board with improving their outcomes—after the epidemic, which results in seven deaths, has been tamed, and Dr. Corbett and the reporter have been vindicated in their mission to improve the hospital. All that remains is to find out if Susan will triumph in her mission of winning back Dr. Corbett.

This book is well written and amusing, as books by the erratic and prolific (this is the 33rd book of hers I have reviewed) author Adele Maritano are, and even includes a sensitive portrait of an experienced and intelligent Black nurse (Tenny Williams), one of the best Black characters I’ve met in a VNRN, alongside Marilyn Morgan. But our heroine’s head-snapping flips in attitude, from insecure new nurse to arrogant hospital defender to “crusading” (albeit only for a day) nurse, are problematic to say the least. It’s hard for me to understand why anyone who knows her at all would want to continue to do so, because her rigidity of thinking and her nastiness to anyone who challenges it are not pleasant character traits. But when Adele Maritano is on her game, she is second to none, and if her heroine brings down the grade on this book, her writing here is top form, making time with it well spent.

Lab Nurse

By Rona Randall, ©1958
Also published as Sisters in Nursing

They were three beautiful sisters, triplets in fact, but each girl had her own distinct personality: Faith, the lab assistant, was the serious and intense sister. Her hair was dark and her eyes, a deep blue. Hope, the staff nurse, had flaming copper-colored hair and she was always gay. Charity, the physiotherapist, was blonde, gentle, graceful—and blind … The three girls were entirely devoted to one another, to nursing and to St. Bede’s hospital where they lived and worked. When three young and attractive doctors arrived—a visiting surgeon, a pathologist, and a house physician—each girl found the happiness, excitement and romance that were needed to make her life full and complete …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“In endeavoring to antagonize no one he failed to succeed in pleasing anyone.” 

“Nothing had worked out as she planned. Not a doctor here had fallen in love with her or even shown the slightest willingness to flirt with her. It had been a very dull visit, after all.”

REVIEW:
This book was originally published under the title Sisters in Nursing, and it’s too bad they changed it because the original is much more fitting, as this is the story of three sisters named, I’m sorry to have to tell you, Faith, Hope and Charity Connell. They are triplets, orphaned shortly after birth and raised by the matron of St. Bede’s  hospital. Each one of them—a blonde, a brunette, and a redhead (what are the odds!)—are beautiful and intelligent and charming. And as we open the book, we find its ending is foretold in its first seven words: “The arrival of three new medical men …”

Honestly, I’m not sure what more there is to say about this book. I can tell you that Faith is a junior pathologist, and that one of the new men, Dr. Charles Wilstack, is the new pathologist. Faith was “shy, reserved, sensitive. It might take him quite a time, he thought, to break down those barriers, but he would do it in the end.” Hope is a nurse on the surgical floor, and on page 19, “just like that, it happened. With no clash of cymbals, no roll of drums. Right at that moment, she fell in love” with Dr. Phillip Trent, the new surgeon, who is intimidating and stiff with nurses, but Hope immediately sees that his actual problem is that “he has never learned to laugh!” and so it not cowed by him. He’s originally from this town and has moved back in with his older unmarried sister Agatha, and is immediately taken up by his old flame, the wealthy and divinely evil Felicity Drake (even she has a noun for a first name), who had spurned Phillip in their youth but is now divorced from the man she’d chosen instead. Felicity is “an elegant young woman. She wore a beautifully cut suit of moss green, with a lavish mink stole and a chic little moss green hat trimmed with mink tails.” I, for one, swooned—nothing makes me tumble harder than a gorgeous, well-tailored suit ornamented with fur, a weakness that dates back to the excellent Graduate Nurse, reviewed in 2011, in which the vixen had a similar outfit but, even better, was stepping from a smart blue “roadster” when we met her. But I digress: Last of the trio is Charity, who is a physical therapist, and who is blind—although so adept that when the new internist Dr. Michael Shearling meets her and holds out his hand to her, he is insulted that she does not shake it, only later learning that it wasn’t rudeness that caused her to miss his gesture. Michael is “tall and dark, with a strong face and a bitter mouth,” which Charity of course cannot see, but oh yes, she can: “At some time in his life something has happened to Dr. Shearing that hurt him,” she tells her sisters. “And he is still hitting out against it.”

And so we have the dramatis personae of this book, but it is nicely padded with some lovely extra characters: Dr. Phillip’s sister Agatha Trent is a joy, as are Matron and Dr. Shearling’s mother. There’s even a happy little dog, Charity’s pseudo seeing eye companion, and a silver gown to wear to the ball. Not much really happens—with a  triple-threaded braid of a plot, each of the strands is fairly thin—but it’s smooth and pleasant and sweet, not at all challenging but mildly comforting, like chamomile tea when you have a slight cold. It’s a story worth reading, maybe best after you’ve had a lousy day and you need a light soothing stroke on your hair. As long as you are not expecting more than mild pleasantries, Lab Nurse will take perfectly good care of you.

Nurse by Night

By Doris Knight, ©1965 

Dr. Tony Warren and Nurse Norma Ferris; how could a love so beautiful go so wrong? That was the question everyone asked—the hospital staff, Norma’s parents, even her patients. What they didn’t know was Norma’s very own secret and it took a heartbreaking experience and Dr. Rick Stanton before people could truly understand their romance. And then Norma understood herself …

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Norma forgot that he might be a murder and hurried to him.” 

“Now, Inspector, I am a busy man. I have lives to save. So this interview is at an end.”

REVIEW:
I’m never quite sure what to do with a book like Nurse by Night. It is an absolute gem, a rare masterpiece—but of the sort that it is brilliant in its daffy stupidity, like the classic Nurse at the Fair or almost anything by Arlene Fitzgerald. So is a stupid book that makes you repeatedly laugh out loud at its idiocy a bad book or a good one? These are nurse romance novels, after all, not capital-L Literature, so I must decide that if a book is amusing and makes you want to read passages out loud or recommend to a friend as “so bad it’s amazing”—in short, the perfect beach read—then it must be good. And so this book earns an A- (maybe one with an asterisk?) instead of a D. 

Nurse Norma Ferris, who it seems has only gotten three hours of sleep in the several days spanned by this book, is a ubiquitous orphan from New York who moved to London to surprise the obstetrician she’d been in love with, Dr. Tony Warren, when he’d abruptly taken a job there. Though actually, Norma found out about the job when Tony’s friend handed him a plane ticket and told him he had five hours to pack and get to the airport, so why she thought it would be a smart move to majorly disrupt her life and chase this guy across the ocean is the first of many mysteries we will encounter here. 

He’s unexpectedly ecstatic to see her again, though he had not written her during their separation, and now, two years later, he is pressing her to get married—in secret, because he plans to take a two-year job in the Bahamas that requires the physician be unmarried—can you imagine such a thing?—and it becomes increasingly apparent from Tony’s hot murmurings while in the throes of passion stolen in the hospital shrubbery what he really wants: “I can’t take any more of this. We must have this weekend together, Norma,” he whispers, and then he’ll go off for two years without seeing her after they’re married. You’d think there would be an easier way.

Then one evening at 11:00 pm, Norma decides to go for a walk when a thunderstorm is threatening, stays out too late after the storm starts even though lightening scares her silly, and takes a shortcut through Porter’s Alley, forbidden because a  nurse was strangled to death there a year ago, the murderer never caught. In the alley she sees two men in white raincoats fighting for possession of a knife. She hears one of the men scream “a cry of mortal agony” and runs off. When she reaches the hospital she calls the police from a phone booth outside, but hangs up before giving any more information other than that there’s been a murder in the alley because “she didn’t intend to get mixed up in this.”

But outside the phone booth door is a “good-looking” man in (gasp) a white raincoat who grabs her wrist and asks her if she’s American and if she heard a man scream. She pulls away and ducks into into the nurse’s dorm just in time for curfew. “Old Mike,” who is usually on duty at the door monitoring the residents, is absent, so she steals one of the wooden figurines he is always carving—but suddenly there’s a massive multi-car crash outside the dorm doors, so she does the obvious thing and runs up to her room to hide, then decides to put the figurine back, but cuts herself on something sharp as she tries to pull the object from her pocket. Returning the now-bloody object without bothering to figure out how she got cut, she heads back to her room, but notices some potted fir trees in the hallway have been re-arranged, and someone behind them sneezes! Now she bolts back upstairs, hides her muddy shoes and wet and bloody uniform in a locked drawer, then figures out that someone had hidden a bloody scalpel in her cape!

So she washes off the knife and has just added that to her collection of Suspicious Objects when someone knocks on her door! “Was it the murderer out there, come to collect the knife?” Because that’s what a murderer would be wanting of a witness, but if he knew how fervently Norma intends to aid and abet the crime, he wouldn’t bother. But no, it’s her roommate—did she forget her key?—telling her that it’s all hands on deck for the car crash, so down to the Emergency Department Norma goes, where she finds that not only a murder and a car crash but a lightning strike in Potter’s Alley has ignited a farm building and burned a couple hiding there, and the farm truck that decided to go for a drive hit a pedestrian and then was found to have a body in the back, a man who’s been stabbed to death! “Norma sighed. If she did marry Tony secretly, she was going to miss being a part of St. Christopher’s Hospital,” and if this much zany activity is occurring in less than one hour, I have to agree it would be a tragic loss—though it might be pointed out that her job there is caring for the same people she had just run from at the first opportunity.

When the immediate traumas are cleared away, Norma is sent to special Dr. Stanton, a new addition to the staff who decided to show up for his first day at midnight and was, if you can believe it, the pedestrian struck by the farm truck. He’s literally bandaged head to toe, for a single rib fracture and a sprained ankle, but Norma knows it’s not really Dr. Stanton because she knew Hugh Stanton in high school in Manhattan, and his eyes were gray, but this man’s are blue! So she passes out on the spot! When she comes to, the patient insists she not leave his side, but sleep three hours in the chair next to his bed, and when she wakes up all his bandages have been removed and he’s better! But he’s still going to stay in the hospital for another two days because he’s the long-lost brother of Dr. Hugh Stanton, Dr. Rick Stanton! And she’s going to stay on duty 24 hours a day nursing a completely well man while they figure out who the murderer is!

Oh, and for her to break up with Tony—several times, in case he didn’t get the picture after the twice she’s told him to his face and the message she sent via her roommate, because “I hate secrets,” she says, bringing up Tony’s not-so-secret other girlfriend. But despite being such a champion of truth, she lies to the police several times about what happened That Fateful Evening, and she does end up falling on top of her patient and kissing him until “she began to fear for his cracked and bruised ribs” (there’s only one), which required a full-torso cast, but only for 12 hours.

We’re only about halfway through the book at this point, and there are so many mysteries to wonder about, not least being how Norma is able to even walk most of the time as her legs are always going weak with fear—but also, how did the scalpel end up on top of the electric meter in Norma’s room? Who got her muddy clothes out of the locked drawer and how, and why did they just throw them on the floor for her roommate to clean up? How does Tony know so much about what’s going on in Norma’s room when he’s not supposed to even be in her dorm? What was the deal with the sneezing man behind the fir trees? How can a woman so constantly paralyzed with fear be an effective nurse, much less set herself up as bait to trap a murderer? And why isn’t there a quota on the number of exclamation points an author can use? The contradictions of plot and prose are nonstop and regularly hilarious, making for one highly entertaining book. If author Doris Knight (and you do have to admire the pun of the title Nurse by Night) tied for fourth in the Worst Author category in this year’s annual VNRN Awards, this book ironically proves the point while simultaneously vaulting her out of the running with its spectacularly fabulous flameout.

Border Nurse

By Dorothy Dowdell, ©1963 

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

GRADE: B-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Saturday’s Child

By Betty Neels, ©1972 

Abigail was a true ‘Saturday’s child’; she worked very hard for her living. And it looked as if she could expect to go on earning her own living, for no one seemed to be in any great hurry to marry her—least of all Dominic van Wijkelen, who admired her as a nurse but who seemed to have no personal feeling for her at all—except dislike!

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Abigail took off her gloves and unwound her scarf and went to find the kitchen, small and a little old-fashioned, with a gay gingham frill round the mantelshelf above the small electric cooker and a row of pot plants on the windowsill.” 

“There was no doubt at all that pretty clothes did a lot for a girl.”

“Happy times are for remembering.”

REVIEW:
This is the fourth VNRN by Betty Neels that I have read, and all the usual ingredients are here: The plucky 24-year-old orphan, here called Abigail Trent, with few friends and no family, a hard worker who never complains—the book’s title being a reference to an English verse, the book explains: “Saturday’s child has to work for her living, and Abigail was a term used some hundreds of years ago to denote a serving woman.” She thinks herself “not in the least pretty,” failing to understand that her kindness, honesty, and smile (not to mention a new pink dress) render her quite beautiful, indeed. She’s hired to work in Amsterdam caring for an English woman with a gastric ulcer, and there she meets Neels Standard #2, Professor Dominic van Wijkelen, a “giant of a man,” handsome and 40, “arrogant and ill-humored,” always treating our stalwart heroine “with the cold courtesy she had come to believe was the only alternative to his ill-humor.” But she refuses to be overly intimidated by the man and occasionally throws some sass his way, which clearly rocks his world view but makes him take more notice of her as an independent woman not interested in chasing his skirts. 

Next is the Neels Standard Plot: Though he is nearly relentlessly mean to her, occasionally he is kind, and soon—here on page 54—“somewhere behind that forbidding manner must be the man she had fallen in love with.” And though “the professor was as likely to fall in love with her as the moon would turn to cheese” (wensleydale?), he does keep finding work for her that keeps her in Holland and him visiting her (patients) every day. Neels is likely to toss in a dance that he invites her to after which he kisses her and tells her, “You have almost restored my faith in women,” hinting at a broken heart that has kept him bitter and alone. There will be at least one child in the story, here Dominic’s three-year-old niece Nina, who requires expert nursing that he witnesses with extreme gratitude as she works tirelessly—sometimes around the clock—to encourage the lovable muffin back from the brink of death.

In this iteration of the Neels classic, we are lucky to meet two delightful elderly characters, both much beloved by Dominic and who need nursing by Abigail. She brings another elder to the table, a former employee of Abby’s family before her parents died, when they were better off, and to whom she is extremely devoted, planning to support for the duration of her career; Dominic hires the old man to be a gardener and odd-jobs man. These three we can see have wisely assessed the hurdles the relationship between Dominic and Abigail must clear and are working behind the scenes—sometimes literally, as we are not always witnesses to what we can easily believe to be their gentle hands on the wheel—to assist the would-be lovers to an understanding.

Ultimately it becomes harder for me to know what to do with Betty Neels. Though this is, on its own, an excellent book, it shares so many similarities with the three preceding books I have reviewed that it’s hard not to feel like I am getting the same whole cloth I have had before, just with a few different patches sewn on to differentiate it for the sake of the copyright laws. It’s a great book easily worth recommending, but I just wish I wasn’t closing the cover feeling that I’ve read it all before.