Dr. Jane’s Choice

Book 6 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1961

Cover illustration by John W. Scott

 

To hundreds of thousands of readers, Doctor Jane Langford (later briefly married to the Reverend Bill Latham) is the most beloved heroine in all medical romance literature. Sternly incorruptible, but often hesitant as she chooses what is right and what is desirable—a gifted surgeon and general practitioner, but a woman first and foremost—Doctor Jane strikes an answering chord in every reader’s heart, for Jane is more than a dedicated professional, she is a woman needing masculine strength and love. In this present novel, Jane is faced with the most important choice of her life—how she reaches that choice makes for one of Adeline McElfresh’s most engrossing novels.

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Don’t you talk her right arm off, Henry. She might need it in surgery in the morning.”

 

“She wanted to share his life, divide herself between being Mrs. Dave Riley and Dr. Jane Latham.”

 

REVIEW:
When we last left Dr. Jane Langford Latham, she was mourning her husband, Bill, killed in Africa by a crocodile, and I am not kidding. She thinks she’s falling for reporter Dave Riley, whom she first met in Africa and who followed her home to Halesville, Indiana, so as to write and wait for her to come around. But Jane isn’t sure, because she really, really loved Bill. So she takes a job at the nearby City Hospital—where she did her residency, by the way (see Dr. Jane, Interne)—as director of outpatient medicine.

 

In the course of her work, she discovers that a local woman who lives in the seedy part of town performs abortions, and goes on the warpath, declaring that she will “not stop until that woman is found, arrested, jailed.” Perhaps not coincidentally, a young pregnant woman from that same neighborhood is found drowned, and now the book turns into a mystery story. Whodunnit? Well, this local reporter, Charley Lewis, takes up the case, and the book is divided between following Jane and her patients, and Charley in his attempts to track down the girl’s killer.

 

I could go into more detail about the case and Jane’s success as a doctor despite her gender, but it’s not really important, and if you didn’t figure out what Jane’s Choice is going to be at the beginning of the last book, Dr.Jane Comes Home, then I won’t spoil it for you. The central question for the reviewer and the reader is, should you read these six books? The problem is that they are neither good enough to make the answer a clear yes, nor bad enough to make it an emphatic no. I always appreciate the quiet competence of the writing, which is occasionally humorous, and here we find a little inside joke: “If you two will excuse me, I’ve got Elizabeth Wesley’s new book. About doctors,” says the wife of Dr. Warren, her former attending in Dr. Jane, Interne. (Elizabeth Wesley is, of course, a pen name of Adeline McElfresh’s!)

 

The books are interesting, but they don’t have a lot of zest or camp to give them sparkle. I enjoyed Jane, but six books about her is a bit much, considering that the format or story of every book was essentially the same: All about Jane and her daily life, and then at the end, a big decision, usually more or less out of the blue, about some man, the “romance” being almost irrelevant to the rest of the book. The mystery that pervades the plot of this book is not a first for the Dr. Jane series—see Calling Dr. Jane—but it’s a bit of a distraction from what is supposed to be the central point, i.e. Jane. So if you don’t have a better book to reach for, go ahead and make the investment in Dr. Jane, but don’t expect her to leap off the page and dazzle you. She’s much too sedate for that.

Prison Nurse

By Dr. Louis Berg, ©1934

 

Young Dr. Evan Dale was in prison, paying society’s just price for transgressing its commandments. This courageous outlaw was the man Judy Grayson loved, but when his life hung in the balance, the only person she could turn to was powerful, ambitious Dr. Hartmann, who wanted Judy for himself. Dr. Louis Berg, out of his years of experience as a prison psychiatrist, has written this frank and shocking story of actual life in the twilight world of men stripped of everything but their primitive desires—and of the lovely girl who came to live among them.

 

GRADE: C+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Between fighting off internes who made passes at her in the ward kitchen, evading the attentions of elderly patients with Romeo complexes and parrying the advances of the attending staff, Judy became a nurse and a woman of the world at one and the same time.”

 

REVIEW:

Judy Grayson’s first job out of nursing school is at the local prison, where she works with Dr. Jack Stewart, the overseeing surgeon, whom she knows from the hospital where she trained. Jack is in love with Judy and wants to marry her, of course, but Judy does not reciprocate Jack’s feelings, even if Jack is a handy guy to have around to take Judy to dinner and out dancing. She is a bit horrified by Jack’s reason for wanting to practice medicine in the prison: “That place is a surgeon’s paradise,” he tells her. “I can get more surgical experience there in one month than I could in six at Medical Center.” She calls this attitude “cold-blooded,” but I find it more practical and, in fact, true; just because you are interested in acquiring experience and seeing unusual cases doesn’t preclude you from providing good healthcare, as Jack is demonstrated to do at the prison on more than one occasion.

 

In fact, the resident who is supposed to be on call to the prison, Dr. Gustav Hartmann, is really the abomination. He shows up drunk at the clinic, never comes when paged, fails to order life-saving medications despite repeated requests, and is skimming pain medication out of the clinic to sell to Red Mike, the inmate with the warden’s ear. (Dr. Hartmann does not, however, demonstrate any designs on Judy, despite the promises made by the back cover blurb, above.)

 

Red Mike and his gang have occupied the dormitory that gives onto the hospital ward and is supposed to be reserved for young patients, to protect them from the “wolves” in the general population before they are transferred to the “farm.” There they sleep between linen sheets, dine on steak and wine, and stroll through the hospital—indeed, even the entire prison—at will. If you can believe it, Judy even encounters Red Mike in the city hospital one day, where he has gone on leave to visit a sick friend. Red Mike is so thoroughly in charge of the prison that he even has a hand in Judy’s hiring, telling the warden, “It ain’t often that we get a nifty piece of fluff like that around here, and I’m sorta sizin’ her up for myself. I need a relief from ‘fags.’ You understand now, don’t you? She’s my stuff.” He pays for his luxurious life by selling drugs and whiskey to inmates, and by skimming off prison supplies for the warden’s own fencing business, so there’s no use complaining about the shocking goings-on to the warden, as Judy quickly finds out!

 

Her ally in all of this is Dr. Evan Dale, who is six months into a three-year sentence for having performed an illegal abortion on a family friend who was going to kill herself if she had to carry the baby to term. So while the book wants us to feel horrified by the concept of abortion, Judy firmly believes that Dr. Dale was justified in performing this one and should not be imprisoned for a “pardonable mistake.” Frequently people who are opposed to something in theory don’t have such a hard time with it when it applies to them personally. Dr. Dale is the “inmate nurse,” and spends his days doing the work that Dr. Hartmann should be doing if he weren’t sleeping off his latest bender. So Dr. Dale spends a lot of time with Judy, and proves his worth early on when she swoons after delivering morphine injections to the prison’s addicts (don’t ask), and he catches her before she drops to the cold, stone floor.

 

The bulk of the book follows the fates of various inmates, Dr. Dale and Judy’s blossoming romance, and Red Mike’s “sizin’ up” of Judy. It ends fairly predictably, though the prison is allowed to plod along in its corrupt and sinful ways at book’s end. I was quite surprised to find the copyright date of 1934 on this book, which makes it one of the oldest VNRNs I’ve met. It certainly is dated, with its cute slang—can, fish, scratch, wise—all hung with apostrophes like ornaments on a Christmas tree. The nicknames are adorable too: Wouldn’t you like to hang out with Cabaret Lou, Broadway Rose, Frankie the Dope, Tough Tony, Three Ball Johnny, and Ice Wagon Reilly? The book is not badly written, but I think most of its excitement is supposed to be in the drug use and homosexuality, which we are supposed to find “shocking” and even, to quote our heroine Judy Grayson, “disgusting.” At this point in time, however, it all seems fairly straightforward, so unless you’re particularly interested at a look at prisons as they were 80 years ago, this book doesn’t have much to offer.

Nurse against the Town

By Jane Converse

(pseud. Adele Kay Maritano), ©1966

 

“Murderer” they whispered of the man she loved. Why did the people of Barfield avoid their doctor? Why did they whisper “criminal” about its director, Dr. Jerry Sterling, when they talked of the mysterious death of his beautiful wife, Naomi? And what was driving Naomi’s brother, Henry Barfield, to use his membership on the hospital board to ruin Dr. Sterling? Desperately, pretty Ellen struggled to find the answers. Pitted against her consuming love for Jerry Sterling were the hostility of the neighbors and the terrible suspicious she could not shake free from her own mind. In a story shaken with passion, hiding at its heart a dreadful secret, Ellen Whitaker finds herself all but alone as the nurse against the town.

 

GRADE: D+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Ellen’s mind had posed the awesome questions about Jerry Sterling’s innocence. Her heart answered them.”

 

REVIEW:

Ellen Whitaker has left her post in Chicago and come back to Barfield, Colorado, her home town, for one simple reason: She is desperately in love with Dr. Jerry Sterling. She knew him when she was just a kid, see—though “the senior class president and undisputed scholastic leader at Barfield High had barely known of a shy, chestnut-haired freshman’s existence”—and was so besotted even then that “his decision to become a doctor had spurred Ellen’s desire to become a nurse.” When he went off to college, she had “lived” for holidays when she might catch “only surreptitious glances” of him—and then she saw nothing at all of him until now, eight years later. Her devotion to Dr. Sterling is held up as an admirable thing, but to me it seems like a very unhealthy obsession.

 

In the interim, Dr. Sterling married beautiful heiress Naomi Barfield, but she was found dead in a ditch a year later, victim of “an illegal operation,” wink, wink. It’s rumored that she ran around with a lot of men and that Dr. Sterling tried to end her pregnancy but botched the job. Never mind that he has an airtight alibi for the time of death, the locals won’t have anything to do with him or the hospital he runs in town, so it’s uninhabited pretty much all the time. Naturally, Ellen feels this is an opportunity that she should jump into: working at an empty hospital hoping to catch glimpses of Dr. Sterling, who, widower for a year as the book opens, might begin to start looking around any minute now. But since he really only passes her in the hall every now and then, it’s not clear why he might opt for her. While she’s waiting for him to notice her, she befriends Dr. Sterling’s best friend, Porter Hubbard, and they even start dating, though she’s made it clear to him that her heart lies elsewhere.

 

All this is set up by page 20, and the rest of the book is an endless back-and-forth between Porter and Ellen about how they can help Dr. Sterling and whether Porter can convince Ellen to marry him. Eventually a Dark Secret is brought to light, but it doesn’t really change anything: We still don’t know who killed Naomi. Or actually, we probably do: We find out about an old doctor who had made a small practice of giving abortions, and who had committed suicide “right after that awful thing with Naomi.” But we’ve been aware of him since about midway through the book, so if he’s the killer, neither we nor the townspeople of Barfield should be at all surprised. We don’t know who the father of Naomi’s baby is, nor are we likely to, since it is common knowledge that she slept with pretty much every man in town. Yet, somehow, Dr. Sterling’s reputation is restored, and somehow manages to fall into Ellen’s arms at the end.

 

After Surf Safari Nurse, brilliant in so many ways, I will cut Jane Converse a lot of slack, but this is a phoned-in job, not worthy of her. Nothing happens throughout the book, the “climax” is actually irrelevant to the plot, and Dr. Sterling is such a complete stranger to both us and to Ellen that her infatuation with him is more than a little creepy. The writing is pleasant, as Jane Converse usually is, but it takes more than good sentences to make for a good story, and Nurse against the Town is anything but that.

Cinderella Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. of Adele Kay Maritano), ©1967
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

“Give it up,” Glen Seabrook had said. “They’re using you, Rita. They’ll never change.” But she couldn’t abandon her family. And she lost Glenn. It all seemed so long ago. Before she became wife to an alcoholic, mother to a son—and widow. At twenty-four, life held no more surprises for Rita Ambler. Then came the accident that changed everything. That thrust Rita Ambler into the arms of Dr. Lester Wyman and out of reach of his new protégé, Dr. Glen Seabrook…the only man she had ever loved.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“You’ve been out of it so long, you think dates are sweet gooey things that grow on palm trees.”

“She wanted to scream out her anger at the pink and white and lavender woman who sat reading about submerged continents while her grandchild displayed alarming symptoms.”

“If one’s vibrations are in tune with the infinitude, there are no insurmountable obstacles.”

REVIEW:
The problem with an author like Jane Converse, who has written many, many VNRNs – this is the tenth book of hers I have reviewed – is that you just can’t always be at the top of your game, but you’re always held to your highest mark. Jane’s highest, which would be (and faithful readers know what I’m going to say) Surf Safari Nurse, is a good mile or two above Cinderella Nurse. This book is not her worst, but I can’t help feel especially disappointed, since I know what she is capable of.

At book’s open, we have something very unusual in our heroine – a widow! With a three-year-old son, Timmy! Rita had fallen in love with Glenn Seabrook, a medical student, who takes the typical attitude of male medical students in love: “Do you think I’m going to let you support me?” he asks her. “It might be a good arrangement for some lush who’s looking for a meal ticket. Not me.” “What difference did money make when two people were genuinely in love?” she asks him, as all the other nurses ask their medical student boyfriends, but he, like all the others, will have none of it. Dumb guys.

So when he leaves her for a neurosurgery residency in New York, she accepts a marriage proposal from the first loser who comes along, a lush looking for a meal ticket named Keith Ambler. Rita nags and scolds, Keith keeps drinking, and soon he abandons the family for warmer climes. Eventually Rita gets a letter from one of Keith’s drinking buddies that Keith has died of cirrhosis in Mexico.

As a single mom, it’s not just Timmy that Rita has to worry about. There’s her good-for-nothing kid sister, Nadine, who is ostensibly studying to be a nurse but seems more interested in shopping for new dresses on Rita’s paycheck than going to class. Rita’s mother, a widow herself, has gone in heavy for the psychic scene, and spends what little is left of Rita’s money on tarot readers and Ouija boards. Neither of these two ladies has acquired any experience with holding a mop, much less a job, so it falls to Rita to clean and cook when she gets home from work. It is her role as the uncomplaining nanny for all these people that earns her the nickname Cinderella, given to her by Glenn before they split up, and which adds additional heat to Glenn’s insistence that he won’t be a sponge, too.

And now the book starts. Glenn is back in town, a surgical resident working with the esteemed brain surgeon Dr. Lester Wyman. But after seeing that Rita is no less a dishrag than she ever was, he turns to feistier nurses to keep him company. Then little Timmy, while under the care of his grandmother, sneaks out of the house and takes quite a tumble, knocking himself unconscious and fracturing his skull. Dr. Wyman operates, foots the bill, and starts seeing Rita and talking marriage. She agrees – but then she finds out that he believes it to be “axiomatic that a surgeon couldn’t keep operating without a steady supply of alcohol to sustain his nerves.” And rumors are flying around the hospital that it wasn’t Dr. Wyman who operated on Timmy at all, but sober Glenn, when Dr. Wyman, shaking with the DTs, drops a scalpel, and then stoops to pick it up … though I’m not sure that readers unfamiliar with the OR will understand the horror and italics this statement is expressed in. The sterile field of the operation is absolutely inviolate, and deliberately touching something that isn’t sterile during a surgery, or apparently intending to use a dirty scalpel, is, shall we say, frowned upon.

During all this crises, the battle axe head nurse, herself a doomed spinster desperately in love with Dr. Wyman, wreaks her vengeance on Rita. But for the first time in her life, Rita stands up for herself. She tells off the head nurse, which is overheard by Glenn, who happens to be standing outside the head nurse’s office when all this goes down. She calls home to check on Timmy and finds her sister is being uncharacteristically sweet, saying that she’s really tired from all the studying she’s been doing all day and that Rita and Timmy should go out to dinner without her and just let her sleep. Rita, the dope, throws this example of Nadine’s generosity in Glenn’s face, and poor Glenn has to tell Rita that Nadine was kicked out of nursing school months ago.

Then Rita gets another call from Nadine’s boyfriend David, a wealthy med school student, telling her to hurry home. She and Glenn rush back to Rita’s house to find that Nadine has somehow gotten her hands on a drug that will induce abortion and is nearly dead from it, while David implores them not to take Nadine to the hospital because if he is implicated in the sorry mess, he’ll be kicked out of medical school. Though it’s quite clear that there’s no way Nadine could have gotten her hands on the medicine of her own accord, after Nadine recovers from her near-death experience, she refuses to name David and says that it was all her idea.

Rita finally sees herself as “the world’s champion patsy,” who has “always latched onto weaklings and chisellers on the pretext that they need me.” Rita thinks about insisting that her mother to find a way to support herself. “It was that simple. And that impossible.” But she thinks she can tell Nadine to get her ass off the couch. Arriving home, however, she finds that she has been spared the opportunity of de-lousing herself. Nadine has extorted money from David’s family in return for her silence and split for Hollywood, and Rita’s mother, having wheedled a cut for herself, is just finishing her own packing before she leaves to become a resident disciple at the Institute for Ultimate Wisdom in California. Free at last, Rita calls Glenn, who rushes right over …

The book isn’t badly written, and Rita’s mother is certainly enjoyable as she chews the furniture with lines like, “Honey, if I hadn’t been properly tuned when your poor daddy passed over into the next world, I shudder to think what would have happened to us.” But she’s a one-note wonder, and while we don’t see much of her, we’d probably tire quickly if we did. Jane earns points for plotting, but the writing is ordinary, and there’s not as much camp as I know she is capable of. It’s more than a little disappointing that we don’t get to see Rita stand up for herself in the end. We’ve seen her take a few small steps toward independence, but nothing significant, and I can’t help but wonder what’s going to happen when Mom and Nadine come crawling home from California.

Alternative cover

District Nurse

By Faith Baldwin, ©1932

Ellen Adams had good reason to distrust romantic love. Part of her job as a district nurse was to take care of girls who had been betrayed by men they had loved too deeply. She had seen things most girls never saw—marriages wrecked, love lost, and passion mocked by men. But Ellen was blond, blue-eyed and beautiful. Men fell in love with her easily. In spite of what she knew and what she saw, she dreamed of marriage. As a matter of fact she dreamed a good deal about Frank Bartlett, a young and very attractive lawyer. They were in love. Their future together was understood. Ellen’s love for Frank was a glorious dream until one day a girl named Gladys said two fatal words. Gladys, bewildered and tearful, had been betrayed by a man she loved. Ellen asked her to name the man. It was then that Gladys said the words that woke Ellen from a dangerous dream.

GRADE: A

REVIEW:
The great thing about the nurse romance novels written in the ’30s and ’40s is that they don’t know they’re supposed to be formulaic, and they end up being, first and foremost, a good story. Such is the case with District Nurse, which is a fantastic, very well-written novel with a couple of small mysteries to solve and a social(ist) message—oh, yeah, and there’s a romance in there, too.

It’s the Depression, back in the day when last names conferred an actual nationality. Ellen Adams is 24, her sister Nancy is 20. (So they’re English, about the only ones in the book.) Ellen is a nurse for the Visiting Nurses Association. As such, she knows everyone in the neighborhood: immigrant Ike, who sells fruit from a pushcart; Italian Joe, who fixes her shoes; German Herman, “the small round son of the man known to the neighborhood as Accordion Al.” Mrs. Lenz speaks German (“Gott behüte! Ganz verrückt!”) and Mrs. Lippinsky is Jewish (“I’m telling you, I vonder. Meshugge, that one…”). They may be of foreign origin, but the book never looks down on them for it; Ellen is frustrated with Mrs. Lenz for giving her son a bellyache with hotdogs and ice cream, but she’s never disgusted.

Ellen meets her true love while chatting with the neighborhood truant, eight-year-old Bill, about his new-found puppy. The dog escapes into the street and is almost run over by Frank Bartlett. “ ‘Why, God damn youse,’ Bill was shrieking at the top of his small leather lungs, ‘you lousy bastard—’ ” When a third-grader is using language I have yet to see in any other vintage nurse romance novel—and this only on page 17—you know you are in for a treat.

Vying for Ellen’s affections is Jim O’Connor, who has grown up with Ellen. Jim is up to something shady, but we are only given tiny, offhand hints (“a sedate traffic officer … saluted him, grinning, but … afterward looked after the car, its newness, and its expensive lines with a frown of speculation on his Irish brow”). It’s a pleasure to find a book that doesn’t beat you over the head with its plotting.

We’re tipped off to the socialist bent of the novel with its dedication: “Dedicated, in admiration, to the VNA and welfare nurses everywhere.” Ellen’s patients by a rule always live in squalid tenements: “Dim gas jets flickered on the dirty landing casting eerie shadows. In each hallway, as she passed, was the disgrace of an open toilet. … It was not astonishing that so many women connected with work of this type turned almost fiercely radical, seeing what they must see, realizing how little they could do, important though their work was.” And so we are frequently treated to Ellen’s feelings about the poor, how horrific their lives are, and how a little assistance goes a long way—but not so much that it becomes annoying.

This book is far more frank about the baser aspects of human life than books 30 years its junior, in which the protagonist does not even kiss her beloved until they are engaged (e.g. Society Nurse, for starters). On page 2, as we are being given a tour of the neighborhood, we pass a doctor’s practice. “What kind of a doctor is he? He has an uptown practice. They come here to him. A clever hideaway. All women, who come.” One minor figure in the book is kidnapped and raped, then forced to marry her abductor. Unmarried women sometimes get pregnant, and their moral character is an ongoing concern. At one point Ellen argues with doctor and old friend Pete after he implies that he is not a virgin: “ ‘A man,’ said Ellen, ‘can regard his chastity as something to be disposed of as quickly and as lightly as possible. A man can, of course, do as he pleases—deny himself nothing. Not, I suppose, a woman. A woman can—you call it sin in a woman, don’t you?—sin once, because she is foolish, because she is in love, because promises are made her—and that’s her finish, I suppose. It’s a swell world.’ ”

The writing is incredibly snappy; by page 6 I had such a long list of great quotes that I quit taking notes. (Just one example: “ ‘It’s Ellen Adams,’ she called; and then, the sesame that had opened so many closed doors ‘…the visiting nurse.’ ”) We live Ellen’s family’s daily life: their dates, their budgetary concerns, their neighborhood and its inhabitants. We really care about these people. Ellen’s rapprochement with Frank in the final pages actually means something, and the only letdown is that her engagement is understood to mean she will have to give up nursing. “ ‘When she puts me before the work, then I know she really loves me. And you have,’ he triumphed.” Frank may find it a victory, but I thought it was a tragedy. Nonetheless, this was the only letdown in the entire book, which is an overwhelmingly great read.