West End Nurse

By Lucy Agnes Hancock, ©1943 

She loved it all—loved going among the poor derelicts of “The Patch” helping where she could, scolding, encouraging, heartening and often healing. ‘Yes, these were the people that need help, Mary Bradford believed with all the young strength of her convictions. That was the reason she had decided to become a Public Health Nurse, and that was the faith that enabled her to stand day after day the arduous work, the disappointments, the failures, the opposition of selfishness and greed. Her heart was torn by the suffering, her faith shaken by the cold, scientific attitude of young Doctor Timothy Rutledge, who had been put in charge of the district. He scoffed at her “sentimentality,” the help she brought to her patient beyond the routine of her duty. She hated his impersonal attitude and she thought she hated him. Their daily contacts produced antagonisms and disputes. She would not give up her conviction that a nurse was more than just a person to minister to physical needs. But Tim Rutledge had to admit she was a good nurse, and when high drama brought her into danger, he followed grimly until, together, they fought an incipient epidemic, stamped it out and with it, the festering civic sore oft eh slums. Then even Tim got “sentimental.”

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Sit tall, act tall and somehow you’ll be tall.”

“Sassy redheads are my dish. Watch out you don’t share the fate of Red Riding Hood’s grandmother.”

“Even a nurse has her uses.”

“You’re only interested in men from a purely scientific angle.”

“’Tis no disgrace to be poor, sez I, though ’tis mighty inconvenient I’m a-tellin’ you.”

“’Twould be hard t’ live with perfect folks.”

“Don’t you want a finger in the world’s pie? I do—I adore minding other people’s business. Life’s exciting.”

“It isn’t always those who live the most dangerously who accomplish the greatest good, you know. I believe there are real heroes among those who keep on doing the little things—performing cheerfully and well the monotonous round of daily tasks, unnoticed and unsung perhaps, but none the less living grand, heroic lives.”

“There are days when I hate it all—when I want to chuck it and get into something easier and—well—less smelly.”

“I’m going uptown to get some mushrooms, Mary.”

REVIEW:
It’s a setup as old as, well, vintage nurse romance novels, but here we find it again: District Nurse Mary Bradford is a passionate believer in holistic medicine, helping her impoverished patients in spirit as well as in body. But her boss, Dr. Timothy Rutledge, “a machine without a heart,” has little understanding for the defeated attitudes of the population, no matter how rooted in generations of poverty they might be. “How she disliked that man!” we learn early on—and well we guess how that is going to turn out. At the same time, “she could not put a finger on one single act of his that was either unprofessional or unethical. But the man was cold—unfeeling. ‘Bloodless!’ she said aloud.” It’s not just Tim Rutledge, though, it’s doctors—maybe even men—in general. “I couldn’t become interested in a doctor no matter how handsome—especially if he were handsome. I despise handsome men—conceited things!” she declares. Um, sure! 

One of Mary’s roommates, Bea, has attracted young wealthy cad Sam Austen, son of the owner of the slum apartments, but Bea has no interest in the louche, insufferable young man. As the roommates discuss Sam’s unwelcome attentions, the third roommate, Gert, tells Mary, “You’re pretty enough, in a quiet, mousy way. I doubt if he even knows you’re alive.” She then segues into a lecture about how young women should date around before they’re married, or “she’s darned certain to want to do it afterward.” When Bea points out that Gert never sticks to any man long enough to get to the marriage stage, Gert stomps off.

In the meantime, Dr. Know-it-all, as she calls him, starts to warm to Mary’s charm and skill, and comes to see her emotional involvement with the slum denizens as a positive. “You’ve got something that does for them what medicine and surgery can’t,” he tells her. “You give them courage and add a bit of joy and beauty to their drab existence. It’s because you really care—you give yourself and that’s what reaches them.” But she remains angry with him for his condescension, and angry with her roommates for insulting her vanity, so when Sam Austen gets nowhere with Bea, Mary takes him out for a tour of the rundown buildings in an attempt to cure his apathy. She thinks the object lesson is lost on him—but her charm is not, and after a few more casual dates, he proposes to her. She turns him down, telling him he’s not good enough for her. Well!

As the book progresses, we follow Bea and Gert’s social lives—though Mary’s is given short shrift, even her dates with Sam—who, like Dr. Rutledge, seems to be improving under her influence; one of the apartments she had taken him to see has been quietly repaired. In the meantime there are about a million patients to visit and treat and have tea or sour wine with, and—this book being written in 1945 at the height of World War II—there are spies and sabotage to overcome in a superficial and convenient fashion. When a gang of overly imaginative children report Mary kidnapped by thugs with machine guns (she’d actually gone to deliver a baby), Dr. Rutledge gives her the ubiquitous kiss in haste when he finally finds her—“That’s something that would never happen again if she had anything to do about it,” we are told, and we laugh in knowing disbelief.

Overall I do enjoy author Lucy Agnes Hancock’s books (except for the horrid Student Nurse, which was a lousy D+ book); four of the six books I’ve read received B+ or A- grades. This book, however, feels perfunctory. We mostly just trot along behind Mary on her daily rounds, and the fun of following her and her friends’ social lives that I’ve enjoyed so much in other books is largely absent. Lucy began writing novels when she was 60, in 1936, and died just 16 years later in 1952, but cranked out about two novels a year in that timeframe, penning almost 20 nurse novels and another eight non-nurse romances.  So I’ve got a ways to go before I’ve finished all her books, and with luck this one is the aberration.
 

Tabitha in Moonlight

By Betty Neels ©1972

Sister Tabitha just could not damp down her feelings for the attractive Dutch surgeon, Marius van Beek, but what future could there be for her in that direction? He appreciated her as an efficient colleague—but she could hardly convince herself that he ever saw her as a woman; she was so gauche and Marius was so experienced. As the last straw, Marius had called Tabitha a Cinderella and asked when the prince would come along with the glass slipper. Little was he aware that only he himself could give the answer to that one!

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Go away and whip up your nurses or whatever you do at this hour of the day.” 

“How nice a wedding is. I mean a wedding where everyone really likes the bride and groom and not the kind where the women go just to be spiteful about each other’s hats.”

REVIEW:
Tabitha Crawley is “unremarkable enough” in appearance, causing many to “dismiss her as a nice, rather dull girl”—but all is not lost, “she had a good figure and quite beautiful legs.” What more could a man want? Certainly not the fact that she’s calm, considerate and kind and a hard worker … 

The senior orthopedic surgeon, Bill Raynard, has broken his patella and has lured Dr. Marius van Beek to come down and sub for him while he’s incapacitated. In typical Neels fashion (though I grant you this is only the fourth of Betty’s books I’ve read) Tabitha instantly experiences a “delightful feeling of excitement” at meeting the Dutch doctor, along with a sigh that he’ll never look twice at her, she’s so plain. (He actually stares at her a while, making her cheeks turn pink.) An old friend of Dr. van Beek’s, his tutor at Cambdrige, has broken his leg, and Dr vB does the surgery, and Tabitha takes in the kindly old man’s cat and helps Marius pack up the old man’s things, as he is to be evicted from his rooming house; Marius plans to take his old friend home with him.

As for backstory, Tabitha’s mother had died when she was 15, and her father—now deceased—had married a woman who did not like Tabitha, and this woman and her daughter Lilith now reside in Tabitha’s family home, where when she visits she is relegated to the attic and exhorted not to wear a beautiful dress to Lilith’s birthday party. But guess who shows up at the party—that’s right, Marius van Beek! She’s in the garden, and he tells her she is charming in the moonlight, and when she answers that she is not pretty, he asks her who told her that? Why, it was her stepmother … but before they can get too deeply into the matter, Lilith, who is intent upon winning Marius for herself, quickly scoops the man away from Tabitha. Nonetheless, he manages to run into her when she’s out for a walk the next morning, and tells her she has an idée fixe, and suggests in the manner of the day that she get some therapy. She fails to take the hint and runs away, but they meet again on the orthopedic wards, of course, where he tells her he’s taking Lilith out for a day trip. “Tabitha fought a violent desire to burst into tears, box Mr. van Beek’s ears and find Lilith at once and do her some injury.”

But Marius turns up in her drawing room that evening, again plumbing the depths of Tabby’s insecurities, and the next morning she decides to wear some makeup to work. Kindly Mr. Bow tells her, “They say that beauty is but skin deep; but there are other kinds of beauty than the obvious one, and thy are vastly more important.” Lucky it is, then, that Tabitha has both! Indeed, even Marius tells her, “You’re a very restful girl. Most women are forever patting their hair or putting on lipstick or peering at themselves in those silly little mirrors they carry around.” (She doesn’t do those things, she thinks, because they “would make little difference to her appearance.”) 

For the rest of the book Marius gently woos her, and she stubbornly refuses to see that he cares, instead construing his kindness to the fact that when he marries Lilith she will be his sister in law—and never mind all those kisses. The remaining chapters are sprinkled with reminders of Tabby’s handicap, such as when she purchases a new hat, “a large floppy one with a wavy brim which she considered suited her very well because it hid her face.” He plays her evil stepmother—who is really completely horrible—and Lilith, winking at Tabby as he does so, but she is unable, unfortunately, to see it. Ultimately, Marius tells Tabby, “A pretty face isn’t always a beautiful one,” in a scene that made me a little vklempt, because I am such a sap. Add to this a touch of gentle humor now and then, and you have another spiffing read from Betty Neels. Her books may be somewhat repetitive, but so far she's been a consistent winner, so I for one am going to continue to read them. 

Backstage Nurse

By Jane Rossiter 
(pseud. William Danial Ross), ©1963 

Shirley Grant was excited about her new job as private nurse for the famous actor, Oliver Craft—and she found herself equally drawn to the two men closest to him: Hugh Deering, a former doctor and now a handsome leading man, and Roger Craft, wealthy young businessman from Philadelphia, who was also the star’s grandson. Both were exciting. Both offered her happiness. But only one could win her heart.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“That’s what working in the theater did for you; helped develop a flair for selecting clothes.”

“A new, pretty girl backstage to flirt with! Maybe this won’t be such a bad tour after all!”

“You’ll get used to her, or else you’ll wind up like some of the rest of us, wanting to murder her.”

“Do nurses take their medicine without complaints when they’re ill?”

REVIEW:
Nurse and orphan Shirley Grant was once an actress for a few years, so that makes her perfect for her new assignment: she has been selected from all the nurses at Eastern Memorial Hospital to care for Famous Movie Actor Oliver Craft, who has pancreatic cancer and is recovering from surgery (in which he was “cleaned up”), but now is insisting on going on tour with a stage play. “The end will be the same, no matter,” he says. “And I prefer to die in harness.” Shirley does have to fight with curmudgeonly senior Dr. Trask for the job, as he thinks she is “Too young! Too pretty! More a fashion model than a model nurse! And she’s a redhead with a snub nose! Redheads with snub noses are invariably stubborn!” It’s not your resume, it’s your looks that really matter! But Shirley fights back: “I’m twenty-seven, and I’m considered rather homely by some people,” which is enough to win her the job. 

The tour conveniently starts in the city where they are, Boston, at the Colonial Theater (which really exists, across from Boston Common). One of the actors is Dr. Hugh Deering, who quit medicine after he was “blamed for a man’s death” – though the actual story is pretty ambiguous. He was the driver in a car crash, and “Dr. Deering wasn’t able to help him. Witnesses said he was drunk. Just stumbled around and couldn’t do a thing,” a gossiping nurse tells Shirley, adding that the passenger in his car died. Shirley, who moments before was thinking “she had just met a pleasant young man whom she felt she could really like, with the prospect of being in his close company for several months,” decides that “now it was all spoiled by this revelation about his character.”

The band of actors includes Joy Milland, “a wild, restless sort,” who is out to own Hugh Deering and possibly encourage his drinking if it will help her meet that objective. Early on, Joy tells Shirley that Hugh has asked her to marry him but she hasn’t said yes. This news makes Shirley decide to avoid Hugh, who weeks later asks her why. She tells him it’s because he and Joy are engaged—which is not actually what Joy had said—he emphatically denies it, so she starts spending more time with him. But he may not be the winner there; she has decided that Hugh should give up acting, even though she thinks he’s good at it, and go back to being a doctor, and she’s rather rude about it. “Don’t you want to stop pretending and really live your life again?” she asks him, and when he says he’s quite happy being an actor, she tells him, “You’re not a man; you’re a cynical shadow.”

She has another man to play with, Roger Craft, Oliver’s grandson. Roger is a real estate millionaire that Shirley toys with a bit: “She hadn’t minded Roger’s interest because she had believed that Hugh was engaged to Joy Milland. Now she wasn’t so sure,” she thinks. Hugh, teasing Shirley about Roger, jokingly bets her a week’s pay that when Roger follows the show to Cincinnati, he will propose—and he’s right, though Shirley thinks one thing and says another. “She wasn’t at all certain that she would like Roger’s Philadelphia family, or fit in with them. And she realized that it wasn’t really important to her whether they liked her or not,” thinks the snob, but then, minutes later, tells Roger she likes him a lot and that she will think about it. “She had almost said ‘yes’ to his proposal. She looked up at him fondly. ‘You’ll be very close in my thoughts,’” says the tease.

The bulk of the book is a very tedious will-he-or-won’t he be able to perform, alternating with does-she-or-doesn’t-she love Hugh. One health crisis after another has us supposed to be biting our nails but instead found me quickly wearying of the repetitive plot. The Roger-or-Hugh debate is so riddled with hypocrisy on Shirley’s part, where one minute she thinks she would like to marry Hugh and the next minute she “felt completely miserable at the idea of spoiled Joy linking her life with that of the young ex-doctor’s.” Somehow the show staggers through a week each in Toronto, Cincinnati, Cleveland, Detroit, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Indianapolis—hard to believe the old man, who is at death’s door every other page, rebounds every time, because I personally was struggling to keep going.

Of course, you know how it will end up, with a medical emergency that calls on Hugh to act the part of a doctor—but it’s quick, with the victim dropping to the floor on one page and packed away in the ambulance on the next. All that remains is for Hugh to tell Shirley he’s going back to medicine, and since this was the only obstacle standing in the way of Shirley’s alleged love for Hugh, they can leave the theater arm in arm. Overall it’s a boring, perfunctory book. The only high points are the rare bit of Iively spark from Shirley’s dialogue and the character of Oliver Craft, who is well-drawn as a grand lion of the theater. Apart from that, though, this book is about par for the course for William Daniel Ross. You’d be much better off opting for Wicked.

Nurse Felicity

By Peggy Dern (pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1966

Nurse Felicity grew up in the Georgia hill country and watched her father doctor the sick there. She understood the natives and they trusted her. But Felicity loved a strong-willed mountain lawyer who resented her work. Could she forget him and start a new life with young Dr. Aleck Potter, somewhere away from “injun medicine and voodoo witchcraft”?

 

GRADE: C-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“You and I are committing one of the scarlet crimes of nurses, gossiping about a doctor. Shame on us!”

 

“How a girl as lovely as you are could possibly be contented to disguise herself in a white canvas uniform I’ll never understand.”

 

“I am not nosy. I’m just interested.”

 

“So many girls are so busy being charming and alluring and seductive that they don’t give a man a chance to enjoy their company, because he’s so busy protecting himself from their feminine wiles!”

 

“Just as soon as you’re strong enough, you’re going to get the paddling of your life, sweetheart.”

 

“I wonder why you and I are foolish enough to put in years learning to practice medicine when just love will take care of any illness.”

 

REVIEW:

This morning I surveyed my bookshelf of VNRNs and sighed at the overly large number of books by Peggy Gaddis still waiting to be read. I decided I might as well get it over with and plucked Nurse Felicity out of the lineup, lured by its interesting cover. But it did not take many pages after opening that cover that I experienced that familiar sense of gloom, an inevitable complication of Gaddis’ books, as I watched Nurse Felicity Caldwell leap immediately to her feet when the call light went on at 3:00 am and hold a patient’s hand until he went back to sleep (you will understand my disgust if you’ve ever worked as a nurse on the night shift) and leap to her feet again when Dr. Aleck Potter enters the ward. The pair then enter into a lengthy conversation that exposes Gaddis’ prejudice against the Native Americans who live in the “Georgia hill country,” and discuss of Deenie Taylor, an orphan raised by Indians because her grandmother was a witch and when Granny had died “no white people would have her,” who now wanders randomly through the hospital apparently just for fun. She hates white people, see, and “some of the patients are so afraid of her that if she just stands and looks at them, they go off into a frenzy.” There’s nothing left for her but to learn witchcraft from the Indian medicine men, they decide. I sighed wearily and turned to page 9.

 

Dr. Potter is just working here for a year to pay back the state for his medical education, then plans to return to the city. Based on his dislike of rural medicine, Felicity “felt that she had never disliked anyone more,” which means he will either marry her or Deenie, but my money was on the latter. Felicity is dating local attorney Corbett Raiford who wants her to quit her job when they marry. “He can’t see any future for a woman finer than being a wife and a mother,” Felicity decides, and Aunt Ellen, who raised the orphan (there are three of them in this book; parents apparently die frequently in Georgia), doesn’t seem to be rooting for him, instead suggesting she go out with that nice Dr. Potter instead! On Felicity’s next date with Corbett, he tells her she should “snap out of that silliness of yours and consent to behave like a reasonable creature,” so you are definitely agreeing with Aunt Ellen, but she continues to go out with him, though every single outing we witness—and there are at least half a dozen of the tedious affairs—end with this same quarrel. So what’s a gal to do?

 

Well, she can have the plot diverted away from her stupid boyfriend by a beautiful young woman, who has clearly spent more than a day pushing through the densest woods anyone has ever imagined, tossing herself in front of the car of Len Mallory, a handsome and wealthy man from Atlanta who is in town to visit his mother, who has had a heart attack. The woman instantly lapses into a coma that lasts weeks, and no one knows who she is—until Deenie shows up and says she’s the insane niece of a woman who lived with her son in the deepest woods near the Indians’ settlement, and that the young woman had shot them both and set the house on fire. Len Mallory, sensing an opportunity when he sees one, asks Felicity out to dinner, when he tells her that he can’t marry her because (1) “I have not the faintest hope in the world of ever persuading you to fall in love with me,” and (2) he would never move to the mountains and she would never move to the city, so they could never be together. Some people have the most interesting dates!

 

Peggy Gaddis loves to introduce us to a passel of young men and women and then play musical chairs to see who ends up with whom. I was a little surprised how the six or seven young people we meet in Nurse Felicity played out, and not optimistic about our heroine’s choice working well for her. In between Felicity’s arguments with Corbett and her sparring with Dr. Potter (who always seems to piss her off to an extent that usually precedes wedding bells in Gaddis’ books), we get plenty of the usual Gaddis illogical nonsense that I guess you’re just supposed to gloss over, such as when the sheriff casually explains to an out-of-town visitor, “This Deenie Taylor is the granddaughter of a witch,” like that’s a normal thing here in the mountains, plus the usual doctor-as-lordly-being, spanking, and scheming, flirtatious women we always find. And in another more unfortunate recurrence, this book is obliging me to write another check on behalf of the White Doctor Foundation to try to atone for its racism; Peggy Gaddis has instigated 30 percent of those donations. I suspect, when I finally finish all her books, there will have been many more.

12th Annual VNRN Awards

Welcome back to the 12^th annual vintage nurse romance novel awards! But in the spirit of my grandmother, who was known to say, “Have some chicken—it’s kind of tough,” I have to state that I don’t think this year’s offerings were particularly outstanding, earning an average grade of C+. Perhaps that was because I fell off a bit in terms of my reading, only getting through 24 books by 18 different authors, but even the Best Quotes, which usually have me snorting with laughter, seemed lackluster. It seems like every five years I lose some steam, and that was the case in 2024. Hopefully I’ll get it back next year!

Someone who never seems to lose it is one of my favorite authors, Bill Neubauer (a really remarkable person; please do read his biography through the link), who authored two of the seven Best Books this year. He wears the biggest tiara of all, having now chalked up the most wins—nine—in this category. Betty Neels, a grande dame of the genre, debuted shockingly late in this blog just last year, but this is her second year in a row winning top honors, and I expect we’ll be seeing more of her in the future. Marguerite Mooers Marshall and Olive Norton, numbers 4 and 5 respectively on 2022’s Best Authors list, again snag a couple berths on the Best Books list for themselves this year. And looking over to the doghouse, there aren’t many surprises on the Worst Books list, as we find Arlene Fitzgerald, Arlene Hale and William Daniel Ross reliably popping up like dandelions in the lawn.

If 2024 is not the most exciting year I’ve had, there are still enough gems to keep the faithful happy, books and authors to enjoy (and dis, which can be just as much fun!). Enjoy, and we’ll meet back here next year for more excitement! 

Best Books

1. Damsel in Green by Betty Neels

2. Arms and the Girl by Marguerite Mooers Marshall

3. Tangled Autumn by Betty Neels

4. Nurse March by William Neubauer

5. Dedication Jones by Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton)

6. Nurse Rivers’ Secret by Anne Durham

7. Million Dollar Nurse by Rebecca Marsh (pseud. William Neubauer) 

Worst Books

1. Hurricane Nurse by Joan Sargent (pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham)

2. Log Camp Nurse by Arlene J. Fitzgerald

3. A Nurse’s Strange Romance by Arlene Hale

4. Beauty Doctor’s Nurse by W.E.D Ross

5. Navy Nurse by Adelaide Humphries

6. Nurse Jane and Cousin Paul by Valerie K. Nelson 

Best Quotes

“‘Your bosom is heaving too—so many girls don’t have bosoms these days. I supposed it’s the fashion.’ He sighed.” Damsel in Green, Betty Neels

“She wished Walt would stop referring to Norman as a man who had committed manslaughter.” Cynthia Doyle, Nurse in Love; Adelaide Humphries

“In the back of her mind she was constantly thinking of Dick.” Navy Nurse, Virginia McCall

 “I do believe you would feel compelled to offer any burglar foolish enough to enter a cup of tea before you laid him out with a poker.” Tangled Autumn, Betty Neels

“The hospital frowns upon interns and nurses smooching in the hallways.” A Nurse’s Strange Romance, Arlene Hale

 “There’s more to conversation than attractive legs.”  Million Dollar Nurse, Rebecca Marsh (pseud. William Neubauer)

“The way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach anymore. It’s through his twin carburetors or his new putter, old dear. You’re not with it.” Dedication Jones, Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton)

“What a tasty looking neck!” A Nurse’s Strange Romance, Arlene Hale

“New lipstick had made the menace of the storm seem less imminent.” Hurricane Nurse, Joan Sargent (pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham)

“She always liked to start a new case feeling as fresh and crisp as the pert, white cap perched on top of her shining head which looked like a spread winged dove ready to take flight.” Log Camp Nurse, Arlene J. Fitzgerald

Best Covers

Million Dollar Nurse, illustration by Darrell Greene

Navy Nurse

Cynthia Doyle, Nurse in Love; illustration by Tom Miller

Log Camp Nurse, illustration by Mort Engel

Nurse in Jeopardy