The Palm Thatched Hospital

By Juliet Shore, ©1963

Doctor Christina Roberts was on her way to Lake Kampili in Kenya, where she was to join her fiancé. But her careful plans went astray when tropical rains left her stranded on the far side of the Umbulu River—in the company of the devastatingly attractive Doctor Dominic Mount.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“I am at my least successful when in the company of members of the opposite sex. Perhaps during our enforced exile together you can teach me how to be a wow with the ladies.”

“You can’t embark on a career in medicine unless you’re tougher than the rest.”

“Being ‘good friends’ can prove an interesting relationship with no holds barred. You should try it sometime, with somebody.”

REVIEW:

Dr. Christina Roberts has a common problem: She’s engaged to an ass. Melvyn is medical director of a nursing home at Lake Kampili in Kenya, “where you deal with the fads and diets of large and lazy women addicted to hypochondria,” so that’s not a good start—but more than that, he has a “tidy, uncluttered, analytical mind” that thinks not at all about anyone but himself. He’s arranged for Christina to spend a year working in pediatrics—to prepare herself for the job of being his wife and mother of his children, no doubt—and then they are to be married, “which would automatically sever her from her brief, so far undistinguished, medical career,” and never mind the money and years of study that went into the making of it. Fortunately for her, however, she missed a boat and was delayed in her voyage from England to Mombasa Island. This led to her getting caught in the winter monsoon, which had arrived two weeks ahead of schedule, the inconsiderate thing, and washed away the Umbulu bridge, so there is no way for her to reach Lake Kampili until the rains stop and the bridge is rebuilt—in several months. Fortunately, on the road where it meets the Umbulu River is a small palm-thatched hospital. Dr. Dominic Mount and his spinster sister Cicely live and work at this hospital, and Dominic offers Christina a job and a home for the months she is stranded, which she gladly accepts. You do not need me to tell you how this story is going to play out. You can probably even predict that a former girlfriend of Dominic’s, Dr. Delia Courtnay, also manages to get herself stuck at the hospital, a clever plan on her part to try to win Dominic back after she’d left him at the altar to chase after another man.

A few surprises do land in our lap, like the fact that Christina clues in early—and dumps early—her loser fiancé. Also a bit unusual is that the star-crossed lovers actually marry halfway through the book, but this is complicated by the fact that Christine contracts malaria on her wedding day and is packed off to Nairobi to recover with Dr. Delia, who pulls in Melvyn to assist in her plan to break up the marriage by making Christina believe that she was too delirious with fever to render her vows anything but null and void.

The stock characters include the bitter spinster made bright by a pep talk from Christina and a boyfriend, the evil vixen who attempts to steal the man but who is eventually thwarted, the domineering (and properly named) doctor Dom, the mousy little woman afraid to speak her mind, and the shiny Fifth Avenue–type MD who caters to rich anxious, bored women. The surprising thing is that this book is nonetheless fairly enjoyable to read—except that it makes little of its location beyond the heat and humidity, the rain, the flowers, and slight hints of the wonderful way Africans have of personifying objects, such as when Christina’s Kenyan guide George points out, “Bridge—bridge, him gone.” We get an odd take on racism here, where individuals such as George and other Kenyan hospital staff are hard-working and intelligent. Indeed, Dominic is praised as “a man who recognized character and achievement in anyone and everyone”—while simultaneously dismissing entire groups of people as “children,” so I’m sending off another check of atonement to the UNCF as my penance for reading racist books. If the plot winds up predictably and the last page with a whimper, you could still do worse than to spend time in the palm-thatched hospital, even if they’ve neglected to include the hyphen in the title.

Nurse with a Problem

By Jane Marnay, ©1957

Only her work as a hospital nurse kept Noelle Carlyon from giving way to despair when her sister Leoni married Timothy Yorke—the man Noelle loved. Knowing that Leoni was not in love with Timothy made the position even harder to accept; Noelle could foresee tragedy for her spoilt young sister. Then John Corringway, a brilliant young surgeon, proposed marriage to Noelle, but Noelle, whose emotions were still centred on Timothy, could not accept, for to her there should be no marriage without shared, equal love.  A trip to South Africa gave Noelle time to clear her confused thoughts, but she had yet to play a part in a tragedy before she found true happiness.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“Don’t try out your fatal charm on me. I’m much too hard-boiled.”

REVIEW:

I couldn’t help, every time I picked up this book, singing the Elvis Costello song: “I feel like a boy with a problem”—except, of course, with a nurse instead, who here is Noelle Carlyon, and who has multiple problems that must be sorted through. In the first half of the book, her problem is that she’s in love with Dr. Timothy  Yorke—but he’s in love with her sister Leoni, and she’s in love with a married man, in the most nauseating way: She’s abandoned her career as an actress in London to come home and sob into her pillow for days on end—and to agree to marry Timothy to go off to Nigeria with him, even though she doesn’t love him.

Noelle, meanwhile, is sweetly courted by Dr. John Corringway, who takes her out for long conversations and pleasant walks and hot tea. He is smart, funny, kind, considerate, and gently presses his suit in a way that genuinely won my own heart. Noelle, however, does not reciprocate his romantic feelings, and the first hundred pages of the book follow her relentlessly circular debates about whether she should marry a man whom she esteems greatly but does not love. Frankly, it gets more than a little dull.

Eventually Noelle takes a gig as travelling nurse to a rich woman who is going to South Africa to see her daughter, and though the back cover paints this trip as a big turning point, it is really just a blip in the story except that on the boat home Noelle runs into Timothy’s black-sheep brother, Rory, and spends a lot of time hanging out with him. He is by far the most interesting character in the book, a playboy two-bit actor (anyone else see the impending connection?) who romances with lines like, “No girl has a right to be such a bewitching temptation if she doesn’t expect to be kissed.”

Back at home, Leoni and Timothy come back early from Nigeria—he’s abandoned his dreams to practice medicine there because Leoni has had a premature baby and has fallen quite to pieces afterward. Timothy asks Noelle to move in with the Yorkes to help tend to Leoni, who plays a wan, vapid wraith—likely she has a bad postpartum depression, but here she just comes across as a bigger baby than her newborn son, Bill. Now, finding out that Rory is back in town after many years away in London (another big hint!), Leoni becomes a wan, vapid wraith who seldom leaves her bedroom or stops crying—and guess what!!!—Rory is the married man that Leoni had an affair with!

Gold-digging Rory continues to hang around the extended family because Noelle’s parents are guardians of her orphaned cousin Judy Temple, who is going to inherit a fortune when she turns 21 in two years, and he plans to marry her money. Noelle wants to out him as a married man—although whether he really is married is not certain—and so save Judy, but Rory threatens to reveal that he’d had an affair with Leoni, a fact that she has never told her clueless but devoted husband, and will even throw in the scandalous lie that little Bill is actually his own child!!! So, torn between her desire to save her sister and her cousin and unable to do both, Noelle is stretched thin with anxiety, and seldom able to see John, who worries that her stress is caused by living alongside a man she’s in love with but can’t have.

The family is saved when a woman in London goes to see the movie Witch of the Veldt and recognizes a bit actor on screen, and her husband chases Rory down at the Yorke residence to reveal that his sister is married to Rory. The cad, fleeing in Timothy’s car at high speeds, surprisingly has a catastrophic car crash, and even more amazingly survives, and even more shocking than that, develops permanent amnesia!!!! His wife turns up with their four-year-old daughter to claim him, though it’s not certain how, with his personality and all other physical abilities intact, he is not going to revert to his bounder ways and give her the slip as soon as the casts come off. John drops by to take Noelle to lunch, and—yet another major plot twist—Noelle’s eyes “seemed filled with misty stars” as she tells him she is in love but not with Timothy, and “what happened for the next ten minutes was entirely personal to Noelle and John!” No bodice-ripper this! 

Curiously, when John asks Noelle why she was all tied up in knots at the Yorke house if it wasn’t over unrequited love, she says, “John, dearest, I can’t tell you,” and that’s the end of it. Further, apparently at no point does Leoni ever learn a valuable lesson and tell Timothy the truth of her premarital adventures with Rory, and never discussed is the fact that Timothy has abandoned his life-long dream of practicing medicine in Africa. The transferal of Noelle’s affections from Timothy to John is not really satisfactory, either, since there is no description of her altering feelings when she is living with the Yorkes, or any of her altering feelings toward John, whom she has seen about once in the second half of the book before the fateful luncheon. Other than these oddities, and the dullness of the first half of the book, this is a fairly good story and reasonably fun to read, but don’t beat yourself up if you never get to it.

Ellen Matthews, Mission Nurse

By Ralph E. Hayes, ©1966

There were many reasons for Ellen’s decision to give up her position at Chicago’s City Hospital and join Father Clousseau at his African mission—not the least of which was a chance to forget her recently broken engagement to Dr. Richard Creighton. The unspoiled beauty of the Masai Plains and the simplicity of its people allowed the young, auburn-haired nurse to sort out her emotions. This was an opportunity to contribute something of value to mankind, as well as a chance to find herself. But that was before she met rugged, self-assured Craig Adams. Suddenly her emotions were once again in turmoil. Could she trust her strange new feelings? Could she be in love with a man she hardly knew?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“We brought the Africans into our dining quarters shortly after their independence. It made a good impression on them, and they have behaved very well here. They are learning.”

“The woman in Africa has not had equal status thrust upon her. She walks several discreet paces behind her man when they are in public together. She cooks his food, builds his fires, tends all his needs. She wants it that way.”

REVIEW:

Ellen Matthews has given up her man, Dr. Ralph Creighton, who is a 33-year-old chief psychiatrist and out to make her both his long-term patient and his stay-at-home bride. Because a breakup is so much more effective when you’re a continent away, she has packed herself off to Kenya to join a mission hospital in the country. The mission is run by Father Clousseau, with occasional drop-ins by Dr. Peter Smith-Talbot for three days of marathon surgery. The good doctor is married, however, so it’s up to Craig Adams, local game hunter, to provide the love interest for our auburn-haired heroine. At first sight, Ellen is less than impressed with Craig, because he is somewhat scornful of her ignorance of how medicine is practiced in the bush, without all the modern conveniences. But “he was, she had to admit, very handsome and very masculine.” So we can see the writing on the wall, even if he admits to some crudeness: “I don’t get much practice in how to act around white women,” he explains.

Life at the mission hospital involves a lot of tropical diseases, and occasionally witch doctors invade the hospital, kidnap the patients and murder them. This makes attracting patients somewhat difficult, needless to say. To help fill the time, Ellen goes out on various expeditions into the bush with Craig, who captures animals to ship to zoos all over the world. This he considers “conservation” work, especially when he is lucky enough to nab an endangered species. Ellen isn’t entirely won over by this argument, but still comes along to admire Craig’s skill and perseverance while running down baby giraffe.

Most of the book revolves around Ellen’s conflicted feelings for Craig. She does treat a few patients now and then, but her work is mostly backdrop and few real patient stories are given to us. The big adventure at the end involves Ellen going with Craig and Father Clousseau to treat a village overcome with sleeping sickness and helping to move the population to a less-susceptible location. As Ellen is on the brink of admitting her love for Craig, she gets a letter from Dr. Richard, who urges her to come back to him, as he is a shell of his former self. Curiously, both she and Craig frame this as if she would be going back to marry Richard, “whether she really wanted to or not,” she thinks, because she felt obligated to help him. It’s a bit of a failure as a crisis of her relationship with Craig, because she’d have to be a complete moron to do something like that. Even if these idiotic impulses are routinely considered by VNRN heroines, it doesn’t make them any more compelling. Then Craig has a close encounter with a leopard in the jungle, and it turns out that Ellen, who despises hunting, has actually done a fair amount of it back home in the Midwest, and is a crack shot. Now that Craig needs her help too, her choice becomes a lot more clear, especially after he tells her that he’s taken a job as game warden and is hanging up his nets and dart gun for good.  

Of all the nurse novels set in Africa, this one is easily the best in terms of armchair travel: Its descriptions of the countryside are well-drawn and vivid, allowing you to really believe while you are immersed in its pages that you are not in any American landscape. Ellen demonstrates more independence in her actions than she does in her interior monologue, and unfortunately the author does not demonstrate the chops to make the dichotomy work, much less acknowledge its existence. But if the story is facile and the conflicts simplistic at best and baffling at worst, it’s still worth reading just for the scenery.

Peace Corps Nurse

By Josephine James, ©1965

Cover illustration by Stan Klimley

Kathy’s decision to join the Peace Corps was the most important step she’d ever taken—and the toughest. Strict self-discipline was required to face the cram courses, endurance tests and survival outings. Each day offered new—and demanding—experiences. Then, suddenly, she realized that something sinister was happening at the training school. A strange African spirit mask had been stolen—and the theft threatened the success of the entire program. Kathy knew that if she tried to solve the mystery, she’d be risking everything she had worked for … but she also knew that if she didn’t try, she would never find peace with herself …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“I’ve seen  movies of Africa, and it’s no place for a girl.”

“Falling in love isn’t like falling in a swimming pool. There’s no lifeguard around to haul you out if you can’t make it.”

REVIEW:

This book is billed as a romance novel, but I have to say that is a huge stretch. Nurse Kathy Martin does have a boyfriend, Steve, who is mentioned now and again, but the truth of the matter is that she is basically leaving him for a couple years to head off to Liberia with the Peace Corps, and we’ll see if he’s decided to wait around until then.

Though titled Peace Corps Nurse, this book is about Kathy’s application to the Peace Corps and then her training, which is held in the San Francisco Bay Area, and has nothing to do with any actual nursing while on assignment, which disappointed me, but it was still a pleasant enough story. Kathy arrives on the college campus with her best friend, nurse Jenny Ramirez, who has also been accepted into the Peace Corps. The pair has been assigned to Liberia—as has pretty much everyone they run into on their training—so they are especially interested in Africa and are taking classes about what life is like there. In a book written in 1965, this could well be a recipe for a racist-laden nightmare, but author Josephine James does a stellar job of discussing the problem. One character, Tony Kepatu, is a Liberian native who is a graduate student acting as a teaching assistant for the Peace Corps training, and he is an upstanding, intelligent teacher. Though accused of stealing a Liberian mask, Kathy and her fellow students largely refuse to believe it. Another Peace Corps student, Faith Channing, is a wealthy black woman whose father is a college professor. She is somewhat spoiled, but she is also vigilant about pointing out racism when she sees it, such as when a group of costumed native Liberians sings and dances for the trainees. “That’s how people think about all Negroes. Happy, dancing clowns,” she says.

The main story is about Kathy’s efforts to locate the Liberian mask, which belongs, coincidentally, from her field nursing teacher, a woman who has spent many decades practicing nursing in rural Liberia. The mystery is not the strongest element of the story, as clues are dropped ham-handedly at routine intervals. But the main reasons to read this story are its light touch, its sense of humor, and the Bay Area armchair travel. If it’s not the greatest nurse novel, it’s easily a pleasant afternoon.

Dr. Jane’s Mission

Book 4 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1958

Cover illustration by Bob Abbett

 

Dr. Jane Langford went to Africa eager to join the man she loved and help him in his dedicated work among the natives. The tiny medical mission seemed secure and peaceful, but as the days passed, Jane learned that the strange and evil powers of the witch doctors had been turned against the hospital and all in it—powers that Jane began to suspect might be stronger than modern medical knowledge!

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Sidonie turned from the window to her patient, saw that the brown-lashed eyelids were just a fraction raised. A most unromantic fraction, but then, when is coming out of anesthesia romantic? Not even the class’s glamour girl could look sexy while full of cyclopropane.”

 

REVIEW:

When last we saw Dr. Jane, she had thrown off the shackles of a corrupt, smooth doctor and fled Indiana to be with her then-fiancé, Rev. Bill Latham, who had set off on a mission into the deepest heart of Africa. Now, as the book opens, the time has flown, and she and Bill have been married for seven blissful months. Jane has, of course, thrown herself into her work with complete abandon, though she’s not entirely won over by Africa. “She simply did not understand these people,” she is thinking to herself in the first chapter, upset that an obstetrics patient’s great-grandmother has attempted to administer a witch doctor’s potion after a difficult delivery. “Their social and spiritual mores, their bewitchery— She shook her head.”

 

That said, though, author Adeline McElfresh does a more than respectable job, particularly considering the times, of imbuing her African characters with dignity and personality, to a degree that I’ve not seen before in a VNRN. The African countryside is likewise presented with a painterly lushness that makes you feel that you are there—and more importantly that Jane is there, which again differs from other African VNRNs (see Jungle Nurse, Congo Nurse, and Bush Hospital) in which the heroine might be working in Cincinnati, for all the background we see.

 

Since this is supposed to be a romance novel and our heroine is married, we can all but see the bull’s eye on poor Bill’s back. Nonetheless, I was thrilled at the spectacular way he departed the scene; it was so fantastic that although poor Jane is all but prostrate with grief, it’s hard to refrain from giggling. But even with Jane back on the market, she is just not very good at love—and this has been a major flaw with the Doctor Jane series. In fact, the next gentleman she tumbles for, Tom Radcliff, basically kisses her out of the blue one day, and then then next thing we know, she’s thinking, “She did love him—of course she did!” and planning her trousseau.

 

But she’s about as lackluster about Tom (her second boyfriend of this name, in case you’re keeping track at home; see Dr. Jane, Interne) as we are—in fact, we’ve barely met the man—which again is not surprising for the Doctor Jane series. For with Jane, she’s either swooning like a 12-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert or approaching her beloved as she would a nail trim. Fortunately, romance is not the center of this book, and the vast majority of the time we are wandering around Africa with Jane, looking on as she cares for her patients with the unusual diseases or settings as we would expect to find in rural Africa of almost 60 years ago.

 

As the pages at the back of the book grown increasingly few and the book shows little intention of going anywhere, Jane suddenly, quite literally in mid-sentence, decides she’s through with Africa and can’t marry Tom. It’s just two pages for her to break his heart and book her passage on a boat down the river, and now we are free to pick up the fourth installment, appropriately titled Dr. Jane Comes Home. One of her patients, a reporter named Mike Riley, has preceded her to Halesville, so we shall not at all be surprised to find her taking up with him in that tome. But as these books pile up, I begin to lose heart that Jane will ever find a relationship that shows any of the intelligence and maturity that she displays in every other aspect except her love life. But overall, her competence, aplomb, and adventures make this book worth reading on its own.

Jungle Nurse

By Sharon Heath
(pseud. Norah Mary Bradley), ©1965

Patsy Leeson knew that being a nurse meant more than just the hospital routine. And so with a sense of dedication still unfulfilled she volunteered to join the medical station in Africa that was doing so much good for many in real need. When she arrived, she was overwhelmed by the dangers of the jungle—rampant disease, wild animals, primitive peoples. But she found the greatest peril of all was her growing attachment to the young doctor in charge, and the battle she had to wage for his love.

GRADE: D

REVIEW:
If you are interested in foreign places, how people tick, medicine, or the evolution of relationships, there is not much point in reading this book. Jungle Nurse is at its best in the first two chapters, before Patsy leaves New York for Kalumonga, a fictional African country, to work at a tiny missionary clinic. In New York she haggles with her aunt and longtime family acquaintance Dana, who proposes marriage to her, about why she wants to go to Africa, and the characters actually have some shape to them. But once Patsy arrives in Africa, everyone is made of cardboard, and we are told more about them than we are shown. Even she herself loses her starch; the gumption she shows in leaving the U.S. melts away and she takes on the character of a shrinking violet who is mostly aghast at what she has gotten herself into: “She could not quite suppress a gasp of horror” at the prospect of crossing a river, and she stared in “horrified fascination” at the news that the hospital treats crocodile bites.

The love interest, Neil, is the clinic’s only doctor, and he is, of course, engaged. But apart from his good looks, there is not much to recommend him. He doesn’t spend much time with Patsy, and when he does, he is no-nonsense or even rude, reprimanding her for tending to his own dog when it is attacked and nearly blinded by a cobra, and leaving the patients with two native workers. He snaps at her, “a severity in his tone,” for asking about a coworker, giving her “an obvious rebuff” that “hurt unbearably.” He becomes angry when she suggests that several members of the hospital staff travel to a nearby village to offer medical help: “He flung his spade aside and came over to the fence, his gray eyes alight with anger. ‘You seem to be forgetting that, so far as the hospital staff is concerned, I’m in charge here! I’ve told you to put the idea out of your head, don’t you understand that?’”

Events occur for no apparent furthering of the plot. Patsy intercepts a knife meant for Neil, but this has no effect whatsoever on their relationship, and there is not even a conversation between them regarding the incident. Not two paragraphs after Patsy is settled into her room after the incident, she has recovered from the stabbing and is back at work.

Apart from the ubiquitous hot, dusty drives down endless bumpy tracks in a jeep, Africa is invisible, and Patsy might as well be working in Brooklyn for all the reader sees of it. Only encounters with the natives, who are incompetent in a way that is meant to be amusing, remind us where we are. The native cook makes pancakes with yellow cake batter, which one diner says tastes like sponge cake. Even so, the hostess summons the cook from the kitchen to tell him, “Oh Mwasa, you’re hopeless! Take the horrible stuff away …”

The treatment of the local residents is unenlightened even, I would think, for 1965. A few natives work in the hospital, but “it doesn’t do to give them responsibility. They’re easily excited or scared and tend to lose their heads in an emergency. Also, their ways of reasoning often leave much to be desired! My boy, Lusamba, for instance … he’ll make a mess of simple things which any normal English child could cope with.” She is amazed that another nurse knows every patient’s name; “to her, they all looked alike.”

In the book’s final pages, when Neil tells Patsy that his love for his fiancée “had been driven out of my thoughts and my heart by someone else, someone who’s come to mean so much more than she could ever have done,” Patsy’s response is, “I can’t believe it!” Frankly, neither could I, and the ending, or the eight paragraphs that follow this exchange, landed as flat as the rest of the book.

Congo Nurse

By Ruth Ives, ©1963

Although tempers flared in the heat of the small African village and the tension mounted between the villagers and the hospital staff, dedicated NURSE ANDREA BARTLETT knew she had no other choice—nursing was her career and these people needed her help. She had other ties:
DEXTER STEWART—the handsome young doctor whom she had known for years but didn’t quite understand...
PIERRE DESSEAU—the wealthy and debonair Frenchman, owner of a large coffee plantation, who wanted Andrea to share his life...

But Andrea also knew that in the case of these two men, only her heart could make the choice...

GRADE: B

REVIEW:
Nurse Andrea Bartlett and Dr. Dexter “Rusty” Stewart grew up together in small-town Piedmont, NH. (In point of fact, there is no Piedmont, NH, though there is a Piermont, just west of the White Mountain National Forest.) Now they are in Bakavu province in the Congo, working at the Lusamba mission hospital, because their mutual mentor from Piedmont, who runs the mission, has asked them to come. (There is no Bakavu province, either, but a city called Bukavu, and a province called Lusambo.)

Rusty is ambivalent about his work in Africa, and agrees to a one-year contract only because he feels it will further his career once he gets back to the U.S. Andrea is naturally disappointed in Rusty’s lack of dedication. She also disapproves of his engagement to wealthy New Yorker Lisa Caldwell, who she fears is trying to set him up in “a soft practice in a swank Park Avenue apartment.” When Lisa arrives at the clinic with the iron lung she has purchased at Rusty’s requst, Andrea accuses her, “You just want him as another trophy in your scalp collection. … He deserves more … than living as a social ornament among your friends.”

For her part, Andrea is pressed to marry local landowner Pierre Desseau, who lives in a luxurious plantation house with Louis XVI gilt chairs, a French provincial tester bed with silken hangings, and a Venetian mirror. She is charmed by him, and enjoys kissing him, but she is turned off by “his brutal attitude toward the natives.” On his plantation “even the gentle moonlight could not soften the squalor and pitiful poverty evident among the natives there.” She points out the contrast between his house and theirs, and he answers her, “There is much you do not understand about these people. Do not try to do everything at once for them, cherie. They have lived as they are for hundreds of generations, and they are happy with their own ways. Changes do not come overnight. … Here on my plantation I try to give them a better life in accordance with their own ways.” He explains that he gives each man land, and supports them if their own crops fail. (While he is clearly taking the role of the great white master, it’s nonetheless an interesting debate, particularly in light of how things are shaping up in Iraq and Afghanistan these days.)

The natives are restless, and a guerrilla troop kidnaps Andrea and Rusty. The pair eventually escapes and returns to the hospital just in time to warn that it is about to be attacked by the guerrilla army. Lisa naturally goes to pieces, and Pierre’s plantation is burned to the ground by the insurgents before the U.N. trucks roll in to save the day. Pierre and Lisa exit stage left, in a helicopter, back to France and the U.S. respectively, leaving Andrea to assist Rusty in surgery and then receive his obligatory proposal of marriage.

It’s not badly written, and it was not a chore to get through this book. But I couldn’t bring myself to care about the characters, which seem flat and perfunctory. There is little medicine in the book, apart from the requisite clamps and severed arteries and deft, gloved fingers. Africa plays a bigger part, though the book is ambivalent about race. Natives are trusted and competent workers in the hospital, but in times of trouble “the whites of their eyes in their dark faces still rolled with fear.” The opening scene in the native village, to which Rusty and Andrea have traveled to care for the chief’s daughter, who is sick with polio, is not overtly patronizing but does make it plain that “they were a backward people,” “poor and ignorant” “savages.” When the chief’s wives wail over the child, Rusty shouts, “This girl is sick, but it’s not with a Wog curse!” (The girl is eventually saved by Lisa’s iron lung.) Andrea’s response is more charitable: “She could understand the feelings of the native women toward things that were strange and incomprehensible to them. Africa, and the Congo, was that way to her.”

The cover is a near miss: not bad, but it would have been better if the male figure looked less like a hobo. Which is appropriate for what lies inside: While not a complete waste of time, this book should not be the first one you reach for.