Island Nurse

By Dorothy Daniels, ©1964 
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Nurse Diana Carvell studied long and worked hard to plan her future, but the blueprint didn’t include Ethan Sloane, who stormed into her life with the crashing impact of a wave against a rock. He affected her as no man ever had—not even Dr. Barry Latham, whom she expected to marry. Was she strong enough to resist this brooding, mysterious young islander who was carefully guarding a secret? More important—did she really want to? On a tiny island, at the height of a hurricane, a beautiful girl faces her moment of truth and makes a decision that will come as a thrilling surprise …

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“It’s doggone careless of Barry, letting you run around loose.” 

“There is something to the old movie and TV business of boiling lots of hot water. Keeps folks too busy to interfere with the doctor.”

“May I examine you? I promise the fee will not be too high and my medicines all taste like peppermint candy.”

REVIEW:
Diana Carvell is planning to marry Dr. Barry Latham, who is in his final year of residency as a surgeon. Curiously, though she works as an OR nurse, she has never been in the OR with him—until one day when she is on the scene when he inexplicably walks away from a routine appendectomy. Word is Dr. Latham doesn’t have the nerve to be surgeon—odd to be finding this out on his fifth year of residency—but then it is revealed that he was just upset because his dad James is being admitted with lung cancer. Diana is enlisted to care for James after his surgery, which fortunately cures him completely, and then the Lathams recruit her to come to their summer home on an island off the coast of Bar Harbor, Maine, to watch him recuperate. She agrees to do it, although it must be confessed “she was considering breaking off with Barry because of his mother’s complete rejection of her”—the woman has not been overly friendly when she comes to visit her hospitalized husband. But she and Mrs. Latham have a quick chat, in which she tells Mrs. Latham, “You believe I’m not good enough for your son,”—a strange way to win the affection of your maybe-future mother-in-law. But it works, temporarily at least, and Diana jets off to Bar Harbor.

She’s picked up on the pier by Barry’s longtime friend, Ethan Sloan. Ethan is about to start his fourth year of medical school—he’s running a bit behind because he insists on paying his own tuition without loans or help from any of his rich friends. Ethan has an overly arrogant manner, telling her on their ride to the island, “I’m going to marry you.” He continues this conceit without a break, except for the time he tells Diana, “I’m not that vain,” and she has to be helped up off the floor when she’s done rolling around laughing. Oh, wait, no, what actually happened is that she agreed to several dates with him, including a late-night swim and smooch on the beach, and before long she is “almost running in her eagerness to see him.” When Barry shows up days later, now finished with residency and planning to work at the island hospital here and there for the summer, she decides “there was no point in holding anything back,” and fails to mention the kissing or the fact that Ethan is planning on marrying her.

Barry is also a picture of contrasts. Though he is Boston “Back Bay, Choate, Harvard,” Barry had decided not to follow his father into finance, showing “a great deal of spunk and ambition,” but in school, “his approach to medicine and surgery was casual. He did work hard and well, but there wasn’t a need for him to excel above others so he never really tried.” When he shows up on the island, he pursues waterskiing and boat racing with reckless abandon, working toward the big boat race at the end of the season. But Diana has work to do caring for James and helping out at the hospital; “she’d never be content, as Barry was, to spend the whole summer simply having fun.” Soon enough, he misses a call to help a man with a gangrenous wound because he’s off on the mainland buying a speedboat—but worse than that, he also fails to come back in time to pick her up for the big dance at the Latham house!

Ethan’s there to dance with her, though, so not all is lost, and she tells him, “When I saw you, I felt like turning cartwheels,” the gymnastic floozy. Unfortunately she doesn’t have time to demonstrate because Barry turns up, Ethan disappears, and Alicia Atwell’s appendix acts up. Diana and Barry get her to the hospital, but then Barry starts acting squirrely—and though Diana talks him into the surgery, it’s “not the sure, hard sweep of the blade an experienced surgeon would have used,” and he worked “almost too carefully, Diana noted,” taking 40 minutes to do a surgery that could have been done in 15. Afterward, “he was shaken and drenched with sweat. When he removed his gloves, his hands were shaking.” (Shades of Nurse Ann in Surgery!) But then she remembers he’s been running around all day with his new boat, which must be why he did so poorly. And she lies to the island MD, Dr. Evans, when he asks for the truth about Barry’s medical skill. “Barry is a poor doctor, an incompetent surgeon,” he tells her. Curiously, Diana declares, “I don’t believe he’s a bad surgeon. I think he’s inexperienced, that’s all. I believe in Barry Latham, as a man and as a doctor.”

Dr. Evans decides to take a week of vacation, curiously at the height of the season when the island is most populated, leaving it alone to be mishandled by Dr. Barry. But just as Diana and Ethan are dropping him off on the mainland, a hurricane blows in—the worse storm ever! Will Barry be able to find a spine and help the injured? Who will Diana decide to marry?

I’ve been known to gripe because a huge disaster plays out in a few paragraphs, and now I’m biting my tongue—this one takes 15 pages, and it drags. Parts of the book had interest and real humor, but so much of it didn’t hang together—is Barry afraid or arrogant? Does Diana believe in Barry or doubt him? At least she’s not quitting her job after she lands her man, but neither man was much of a bargain, so it was hard to feel too pleased with her choice. Overall there just isn’t enough to recommend this book.

Wings for Nurse Bennett

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1960

“Office-dressing” … That, Sarah thought wryly, was exactly what she had been as nurse to the handsome and successful Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter. Looking wand-slim and elegant in her white nylon uniform, her heaviest duty had been to stand by serenely while Ralph administered to the imaginary needs of some fawning, simpering female. And now she was suddenly in the wilds of Alaska, newly appointed stewardess of the Alaska Passenger and Freight Airlines, about to board the frighteningly small and flimsy-looking plane for her first trip. But at least, she assured herself, here she could be useful. And perhaps, in this new land, she would get a new perspective on her life. Because she had to make up her mind about Ralph. She had to decide whether she could marry a man she loved—but didn’t respect.

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“ ‘Can you imagine a man ever wanting to go to bed with Miss Davenport, darling?’ Ralph had asked her once when, miraculously, the waiting room was empty. ‘She’s a good nurse—the best in Dayton, barring not even you, but ugh.’ He had kissed her. ‘Don’t ever let yourself get fat and frumpy, sweetheart.’ ”

REVIEW:

Sarah Bennett is working as a flight attendant on a small Alaskan airline (apparently in the old days flight attendants were nurses as well; in any case, she is one). She’s taking time away from her job working for Dr. Ralph Caldwell Porter, who is just as he sounds: A pompous, society doctor who panders to neurotic wealthy women, and who plans to marry Sarah and turn her into one.  She’s desperately in love with Ralph and can’t wait to marry him, she says, but is constantly thinking things like how great it was to be a flight attendant, “a member of the team, just as she had been at the hospital, as she had not been, not really, in Ralph’s office.” But she’s managed to tear herself from his well-groomed side for a few months to step onto the plane, subbing on the job formerly held by her old friend and wife of the pilot Paul Fergis; Jenny Fergis is pregnant, and so grounded. It’s Sarah’s third day on the job when this particular flight takes off from Killmoose to Tanacross, and not half an hour into the flight, one of the passengers steps into the cockpit with a revolver and knocks out Al Malcolm, the co-pilot.

Back at air control, the radio is blasting reports of three men who crashed a stolen Cessna near Killmoose and haven’t been seen since. The men are wanted for questioning in the attempted sabotage of one of the United States’ Distant Early Warning bases in far northern Alaska—these would be the bases where, during the Cold War, people sat around and watched the skies for incoming Soviet nuclear missiles, so they could call home and say goodbye before the missiles arrived on American soil. The air traffic folks instantly recognize from the descriptions that these guys are on Sarah’s flight!! Now everyone is combing the Alaskan wilds, but it’s a lot of ground to cover, so things are looking grim…

Meanwhile, the gun-toting head basher puts the plane down in a clearing hundreds of miles off course and hustles everyone except his two co-conspirators off the plane, then takes off again. So now the story’s narrative jumps from the worried air controllers listening to the news, to the passengers trying to survive in dilapidated miners’ cabins in the woods, to Paul Fergis and a passenger who have set off through the Alaskan winter to try to find help. As the passengers trap rabbits and build bedding out of spruce boughs, Al Malcolm is increasingly warming the cockles of Sarah’s heart, though she tries again and again to remind herself that “she was in love with Ralph, she was going to marry him—to her Al Malcolm could be no more than Paul Fergis’s co-pilot.” But there’s just the small problem that Ralph is a philandering ass, and is never set up to be anything but, even to Sarah: “Sarah wished she could think of Ralph Porter without something unpleasant nudging into her mind,” she thinks before we’re a quarter of the way through the book—“Why did she keep thinking of Ralph? Remembering things that made her slightly sick at her stomach.” I wonder how everything is going to turn out?

Of course, the passengers that the bad guys have been kind enough to abandon rather than simply murder outright are prone to all sorts of health issues.  Needless to say, everything turns out swimmingly for the stranded passengers, who have the capable Sarah to steer them through their medical crises, though she is inclined to a hysterical interior monologue: “Oh, God, Sarah thought. Suppose something is going wrong?” she wonders when she’s delivering a baby, which despite her fears—“Oh, God! Was the baby stillborn? After all this—” is perfectly healthy, only now she’s got to concoct something else to worry about, like the baby catching “pneumonia, here—” But it doesn’t, so on to the next emergency: One man, unfortunately named George Jefferson, develops right lower quadrant pain and “Sarah’s breath caught in her throat. Not appendicitis! Please, God, don’t let it be appendicitis.” But it is, and now we have pages of watching George’s temperature rise: “Four-tenths in an hour? Oh, God!” But she convinces Al Malcolm to assist her with the surgery, which she pulls off effortlessly in 43 minutes. Now she’s worried that she’ll go to jail: “What would they call it, practicing surgery without a license? Or—or criminal negligence?” For crying out loud, someone get this woman a Xanax!

Eventually the two men wandering the wilderness are spotted by a rescue plane, the party in the woods is whisked back to civilization, George Jefferson recovers easily and reveals that he is actually an FBI agent assigned to nab the bad guys who hijacked the plane—not a very good one, it seems—and the bad guys, not being very good pilots, are discovered to have crashed the second plane as well and killed themselves in the process. Sarah finds she’s not going to jail or lose her job, and that she does not love Ralph after all. Not to worry, though, someone else is waiting to offer her marriage on the last page, and then—oh, God!—we can finally close the book.

Walk out of Darkness

By Arlene Karson, ©1963
Cover illustration by Harry Schaare

Nurse Ellen James was torn by indecision. Chet Matthews was demanding she set a date for their wedding—but Ellen wasn’t sure that she loved him. She knew Chet had a brilliant future in the publicity field. In fact, he had just asked her to go along on a three-day walkathon to promote untamed Padre Island to tourists. Ellen decided to go along. That’s when she met Dr. Tom Phillips, a strange, lonely man, and became even more confused by her own emotions. There on a wild, desolate stretch of sand, both men were faced with a crisis of life or death. Ellen knew that the key to her future happiness depended on which man could meet the challenge—and win her heart.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Wear the gold dress, all right? The special one, and I’ll bring my whistle.”

“No man wants his wife working unless it’s necessary. You’ve given over two years to humanity. Now give your time to me. This humanity needs you, honey, really needs you.”

“You have lovely legs, Ellen. Too bad you have to hide them in those white stockings and monstrous shoes.”

REVIEW:
Ellen James is a 22-year-old surgical nurse who has been dating Chet Matthews, an up-and-coming publicity executive. (He is “about” 25, and I had to ask myself why the author wasn’t more certain about his age, given the fact that she herself was making it up.) Chet has been begging her for the last few months to marry him, but she just can’t bring herself to say yes. Part of her reluctance stems from her belief that he doesn’t love her all that much: “Sometimes she had the feeling that if she refused him permanently he would bear no lasting scars.” Then there’s his insistence that she would have to give up working if they married—and we all know how that’s going to work out for him. (I have to pause here and try to recall if a single nurse who has been unwilling to quit working before marriage ever did so happily afterward, and I can’t think of any.) But oddly, she seems to think that if she loved Chet enough, she would want to give up her career: “Did she really love him? If so, why did the thought of giving up her work at the hospital make her feel lonely and lost?”

One largely unaddressed issue is the fact that she seems to disapprove of his work and his lifestyle. “She had gone with him to cocktail parties, dinners and other social functions he must attend to keep in touch with the right people—men and women to whom he could go when he needed to raise money for another of his publicity schemes. She could never get enthused over them as Chet did.” So the thought of spending the rest of her life going to parties isn’t exactly thrilling her.

The problem about this common plot setup—the heroine engaged, or thinking of becoming engaged, to the wrong man—is that frequently the man in question is such a dolt that you can’t understand why she hasn’t dumped him long ago. Chet is indeed one of these, and Ellen spends no small amount of time ruminating over his flaws: “Chet had a habit of making snap judgments about people, and too often he was influenced solely by external factors. It disturbed her, because too often he was wrong. Chet flitted from one strong attachment to another, sometimes using people for what they could do for him rather than for their own personalities.” Then, on the very next page, she asks herself, “Why did little things about him disturb her so much?” I don’t know about you, but where I come from, if someone is manipulative and shallow, that is a major character flaw, not a “little thing.”

Chet’s latest job is director of publicity of Padre Island, off the Texas coast. He wants to turn what he calls “this God-forsaken island” into another Miami Beach, but Ellen prefers it in its almost completely wild, windswept state. (As it happens, the Padre Island National Seashore was established in 1962, the year before this book was published, so Ellen got her way in the end.) Curiously, she never discusses this with Chet, just sighs that the natural beauty she loves is being threatened. To promote development on the island, Chet comes up with the idea to stage a three-day “walkathon,” a competition in which the participants walk 100 miles along its beaches over three days, followed by television crews and a large raft of support vehicles. Such an enterprise will require medical staff, of course, and when he asks Ellen to help, she readily agrees.

The doctor for this dog-and-pony show is Tom Phillips (he’s “around” 32), a former surgeon with a tragic past who now works as a public health doctor. He used to be married, with two young children, but they were killed in an automobile accident—someone ran a red light—and he took to drinking, gradually sinking more and more, until the day he froze during an operation. He’s thrown down his scalpel and moved to Texas to get away from the memories, and now he’s just a shriveled shadow of his former self, though he did quit drinking over a year ago. It’s a little out of his reclusive and curmudgeonly character to agree to participate in this production, but to the book’s credit, he repeatedly asks himself what in the world he was thinking when he agreed to it. It seems he’s beginning to recover from his grief and seek solace in the company of other people again, even if he doesn’t realize it yet.

The main company he will be keeping is, of course, Ellen. Chet has promised to spend the race with her, but two big shot executives are coming along for the race, and he promptly dumps Ellen with Tom to make room for them in his jeep. She and Tom get off on the wrong foot when he deeply insults her by saying, “Beyond performing your duties, I expect nothing of you.” (Is this an implication that she might be thinking of entertaining him, wink, wink, after hours?) She is livid, and he is deeply embarrassed at what he said, so now he has to be nice to her, and they slowly become friends.

The bulk of the book follows the race itself: The contestants and their personal stories, the behind-the-scenes work of putting up and taking down tents, the management of the food and water supplies, the orchestration of the reporters and television crews. The crisis comes on the second day, when a brutal storm blows up and the caravan of supply trucks becomes mired in the sand and is largely unable to reach the competitors at the end of their 40-mile leg for the day, so they have little food or shelter. Chet, predictably, reacts to the crisis by driving off into the sand dunes, ostensibly to look for help, curling into a ball on the front seat, and taking a nap. Ellen notices his absence and goes after him, chews him out royally, and tells him how to take control of the situation (“loudly and efficiently”). This actually helps save the day and Chet’s career, though it puts an end to their relationship.

The other turning point in the book—the one we saw coming from the minute we got Dr. Tom’s back story—is when one of the contestants comes down with acute appendicitis and requires immediate surgery in the middle of the storm, when they barely have shelter, much less a full OR. So when Tom tells Ellen the whole truth about his past and why he can’t ever operate again, she has to whip him into shape as well, in what I found to be a great speech: “I can’t fight you,” she tells him. “I can’t fight an empty shell. I can’t shame you or call you names. But if you don’t operate on him—then I will!”(It actually gave me a shiver to see a VNRN heroine step up, strong and confident, in a way that few ever have.)

This book has more than the usual VNRN, in part due to the strong backbone of a plot provided by the race; something more than a curiosity about who the nurse was going to marry drives you to keep turning the pages. If parts of the story are predictable, well, I’m willing to overlook that if I care about the characters, and in Ellen I found a strong, intelligent (mostly, except where Chet was concerned) heroine. Tom is also sympathetic, but the growth in his character from hermit to husband was realistic in that it was not completely due to his meeting Ellen; it was already underway when they met. Then there’s a title that actually refers to the storyline with a double entendre, a rarity in VNRNs, when you’re lucky if the title has anything at all to do with the story line (see any of Florence Stonebraker’s novels). Give it a great cover illustration and top it off with a rather cute ending, and other nurse novels pale beside Walk out of Darkness.

Nurse Todd’s Strange Summer

By Zillah K. Macdonald and
Vivian J. Ahl, ©1960

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Nurse Ann Todd, on a special duty assignment on the misty coast of Maine, found two men … and a mystery. There was Quint Towne, who made her pulse thump though her heart said no … And there was Dr. Bruce McNab, brilliant and lonely, shunned by the people who needed him most, blamed for some strange tragedy no one would name. As Ann struggled in the web of hate and suspicion that enmeshed the town, the tension around her tightened its grip on her heart. Then, on the terrifying, gale-lashed waves of Jericho Bay, Ann found the answer to the mystery of Dr. McNab … and the key to her own future.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“He had neither flinched nor groaned. Like his state of Maine, there was granite in him.”

“He’s a kind of measles that gets every girl who runs into him.”

“Nurses are so bossy, you know.”

“She was not blind to the value of a married-woman status in her field. There was always the idea that unmarried women didn’t know the essentials of life.”

REVIEW:

Nurse Todd’s summer, despite what you may have heard, wasn’t that strange. Ann Todd left her job at a hospital in New York to work in Maine as a private nurse to Quint Towne, a wealthy gadabout whom she had nursed after he injured his back when he fell from a horse in Central Park. She’s fallen in love with him, and is looking forward to spending the summer assisting him through his rehab. But when she arrives in his summer hometown off Jericho Bay (which is just southwest of Bar Harbor and Acadia National Park, if you care to know), she is met by a postcard from Quint’s mother and constant companion, Jane, who informs her that they are in Florida and will not arrive in Maine for four more weeks.

Fortunately, the town has a doctor, Bruce McNab. Soon she is working for him, drawing blood, visiting patients around town, and helping during office hours. But she discovers that the town harbors a grudge against Dr. McNab, and most of the citizens prefer to drive to a town 20 miles away for their healthcare. She thinks this has something to do with her landlady, Lett, a talented pianist who suffered a broken wrist two years ago. Lett’s hand became paralyzed after the accident, and Lett’s career was ruined. The town believes Dr. McNab, who at the time was working as an intern under the town’s previous doctor, bungled the job, and still hasn’t forgiven him. Ann is determined to save Dr. McNab’s reputation, so she sneaks a look into the doctor’s files, but the first page of Lett’s chart is missing, and she can’t find out for sure what happened. Then she tries a little physical therapy on Lett, though Lett’s sister Parthie is dead set against it. (And get used to these names; everyone in Maine is named something like Keziah, Ephraim, Llewellyn, and Lucius, perhaps because it’s such a quaint place.)

Four weeks fly by, and Quint is back and doing splendidly, so Jane tells Ann they won’t be needing her services after all. Quint starts dating her, but he’s also seeing the local artist, Mallie, sometimes back-to-back on the same night, the cad. Soon summer rolls into fall, and Ann isn’t making much headway in her campaign on Dr. McNab’s behalf. Then a huge nor’easter blows up, and wouldn’t you just know it, a young woman living out on Hen Island has come down with appendicitis. She and Dr. McNab pack up their supplies and run through the storm to save the woman’s life with an appendectomy on the kitchen table, and suddenly she’s thinking that going back to New York is going to be really difficult, because “this was the life she would have chosen.” After watching her quiver with alarm prior to the operation—“She dreaded the storm, and she was afraid of another fear, one that came unbidden and of which she was ashamed, fear of gossip if he failed! His failure would reflect on her, too; she must face that because of her association with him!”—I’m a little perplexed by this sudden transformation. 

Safely back on the mainland, Ann is met on the docks by Quint, who smooches her heartily and asks her to marry him. She briefly considers the proposal, despite having declared, just eight pages earlier, that “she was through with Quint.” The truth it that she’s falling for Dr. McNab, but since he has been spending a lot of time with Mallie, she thinks she might as well marry Quint, since “life had to be lived.” But she quickly snaps out of it and turns him down—and on their way off the dock they pass the doctor, who doesn’t even wave, to Ann’s great disappointment. He is decidedly cool after that, and spending more time than ever with Mallie, but Ann cannot connect the dots. Further evidence of her lack of sense is provided the next day at Dr. McNab’s office: A young patient bouncing on an antique sofa finds a crumpled chart in a hole in the upholstery that was pointed out to us with much fanfare 40 pages ago. Oblivious Ann takes the chart without looking at it and stuffs it into the pocket of her uniform. That night she finally reads it, realizes that is plainly shows that the previous doctor was the one who mishandled Lett’s fracture, and tucks it into the Book of Devotions that she sanctimoniously keeps on her bedside table, planning to wave it around town tomorrow to trumpet Dr. McNab’s innocence.

But then she wakes in the middle of the night by someone creeping into her room—it’s Parthie, looking quite mad and nervously twisting a scarf. She wants that chart! Ann thinks about how valuable the chart is, and how much she loves the doctor—and then promptly gives the game away by reaching for the book. Parthie gets there first, grabs the chart, and burns it to ashes. Her mission accomplished, she completely goes to pieces and confesses all: She’d done the old doctor’s books for him for years and had fallen in love with him, though he was married and had no interest in her. She had known that it was he who had botched her sister’s case, but she wanted to protect the old doctor, so she stole the chart, stuffed it into the sofa, and spread the rumor around town that Dr. McNab was responsible for the malpractice. Ann again tells Parthie that a little PT will have Lett banging out sonatas in no time flat, and this time Parthie agrees to allow Ann and Dr. McNab to treat Lett’s arm. And once she’s healed, Dr. McNab’s reputation will be saved!

All that is irrelevant, though, because in the morning, Dr. McNab gets a letter from one of the town’s leading citizens, who likes to vacation on Hen Island. He has been so impressed with Dr. McNab’s treatment of the woman with appendicitis, who is a dear friend of his, that he has invited Dr. McNab to serve on the local hospital medical board, thereby anointing him as a worthy medico. Then it’s just a few short sentences to engage Quint and Mallie, and drop Ann into the good doctor’s arms, and it’s all over.

And none too soon. Ann starts out well enough, but once Quint comes back to town, she transforms into one of the more immature heroines I’ve met. After she’s released from her job nursing Quint, she can’t bring herself to actually ask Dr. McNab to keep her on, just telling him that she’s going to have to go back to New York and, when he accepts the news with aplomb, she becomes angry that he doesn’t tell her he wants her to stay, when she can’t tell him that she wants to. She’s angry with Quint because he doesn’t take her to meet his socialite friends when they go out on dates, and decides she wants to stop seeing him. But before she can tell him this, he stops coming around: “Ann had wanted to break away from him and it had happened, but she knew now she had wanted the break to be on her own terms. She missed him.” He tells her he can’t see her because his mother doesn’t like it, and she controls his income. “Then why not get a job? she almost stormed, then remembered he was not in any condition to do that.” And her thoughts are much too frequently punctuated with exclamation points! “Ann knew both triumph and fear! Triumph that his diagnosis had been confirmed. Fear that they might be too late!” “And then, at five o’clock, the telephone did ring!” “Her courage zoomed up! They must not fail!”

The writing is otherwise bearable, but chapters are given titles, the first time I have seen this in a VNRN, and this offers an opportunity for a chuckle at chapter 15, named “Ann Shares a Fateful Moment with ‘B.M.’ ” (I’m trying to imagine that how that scene plays out.) One superlative feature of this book is its extremely descriptive depictions of medicine. We watch Ann make a bed with the patient in it, pack a mobile OR and set it up, and assist in an appendectomy, and these scenes are among the most realistic and detailed I’ve encountered in a VNRN. But apart from this, and the armchair-travel thrill of hearing mention of places you know of (if you know of Maine), you’re better off allowing Nurse Todd to navigate the northeast without you.

Sea Nurse

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1970
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

A secret sorrow haunted Nurse Melinda Madison. She had signed on as cruise nurse to run away from a love affair that had ended in tragedy. And now she was assigned to work with Dr. Peter Raymond. She remembered him from her student nurse days. She’d had a crush on him when he was a promising young surgeon. Why was he the ship’s doctor? Was he running away, too?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“The girl’s appearance was certainly consistent with what the shipping line sought in female staff ashore and at sea.”

“Sue was also on the prowl, but not for any casual affair with a ship’s doctor. Sue’s objective was to marry wealth.”

“His body seemed lighter, younger than when fully dressed.”

“Very briefly their eyes met and he smiled at her, pleased with the way the swab had come firmly and without hesitation into his hand.”

“Enjoy your first sight of Hawaii, Lindy. It’s something you’ll never forget. Aloha-land as they call it, where Polynesia holds out her charms for your enjoyment. At a price.”

“People desperately ill sense trouble in others. Their condition sharpens their perception.”

REVIEW:
Melinda Madison has run away to sea. She’s left her job in Los Angeles to escape the heartbreak of losing her fiance Roy to myelogenous leukemia and taken a position as a ship’s nurse aboard the cruise ship Nirvana. At her first meeting with the ship’s doctor, Peter Raymond, he’s sporting a smear of lipstick on his mouth and stale liquor on his breath. She recognizes him: She used to work as a scrub nurse when he was the house surgeon at her L.A. hospital, but two years ago he left for New York to practice open-heart surgery. After a little prodding, he remembers her, too, hazily. But he doesn’t think well of her backstory. “Sometimes we mistake pity for love,” he says. “You fell in love with a man knowing he had a terminal disease. I used to think you were a smart girl.”

Dr. Raymond is a changed man, because in L.A. he was very serious about his work and would date each nurse only once, so as not to get attached. “Peter Raymond had certainly changed from the sincere young man she had known, yet why should the change in him worry her so?” Lindy asks herself. Gosh, I wonder. He flirts with her shamelessly during an open appendectomy on a crew member: “Reaching for the suture table his face was close to hers, and she saw that his eyes were smiling above his mask.” But he’s still playing the cad with every other woman on the ship, so she shrugs him off.

Soon she meets Shane Reinhart, a newspaper tycoon on the cruise, who teaches her to surf in Hawaii and takes her snorkeling in Tahiti. Before long he’s proposed marriage. But she’s still not over Roy, so she just hangs out with him every possible minute, leading the poor man on while keeping him at arm’s length. Shane eventually spills Peter’s secret, after the good doctor punches him in the mouth for putting the moves on Lindy: Peter is escaping a scandal in which he attempted to save a girl’s life by giving her open-heart massage, but she died anyway. Though he was never convicted of wrongdoing, Peter was driven from New York by the girl’s father, who was on the medical board that reviewed the case.

As Lindy dumps Shane once and for all in Sydney, Shane proves he is a far better man than Lindy deserves and informs her that she never really loved Roy because “it has to be physical too. You can’t love a man with your mind.” He also lets her in on the fact that she really loves Peter, and has for a long time. Back on ship that night, Peter runs into her out on deck under the moonlight and tells her that in L.A. he’d been in love with her and wanted to ask her to marry him—never mind that he didn’t remember her when he saw her again on the ship. As he’s paged to the captain’s office, bringing their brief conversation to an abrupt end, the stars light up in Lindy’s eyes …

The best thing about this book is the cover. The story, at more than 200 pages, is a whole lot of nothing. Nothing really happens, none of the characters are very appealing, and apart from an occasional hint of camp, there’s no reason to read this book. It didn’t make me as seasick as Cruise Ship Nurse, the only other shipboard VNRN I’ve read, but that’s not saying much. I know of at least two more cruise nurse novels out there (a second Cruise Ship Nurse and Nurse Laurie’s Cruise), but if these don’t prove any better, I’m going to stay ashore.

Ring for the Nurse

By Renée Shann, ©1959

Sue Woodford seemed to have everything a girl could desire. She was unofficially engaged to handsome Dr. Don Langton—unofficially only because romances between the doctors and the nurses were not encouraged at Rosemead Hospital. When rumors began to circulate that Dr. Langton was paying considerable attention to lovely Vanda Corrin, Sue could do nothing about it. But then Don, in an unguarded moment, called Vanda “Meg,” and Sue slowly began to be aware that there was a closeness in Don and Vanda’s relationship that she could not penetrate. It took an emergency operation aboard a ship to make Sue realize whom she really loved.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“He’s just my type. Rugged and rather boorish and often so rude that one almost hates him.”

“ ‘I think,’ he said, ‘I’ll emigrate to the colonies.’ ”

REVIEW:
The cover of this book certainly gets your hopes up. With that title, and its fantastic type, you expect this is going to be some sort of horror story. It’s not, and doesn’t quite live up to the promise of the cover. But it’s a nice enough little book, and besides, it’s British!

Sue Woodford is 20 or 21 (both ages are given to her), a nurse working in a small village hospital. She’s engaged to Don Langton, a moody doctor more than 10 years her senior who tells her, interestingly, that he has a “black monkey” on his back that he’s had all his life. “It made him moody and difficult, and sometimes it would perch there for days at a time.” She’s young and insecure, and always waiting around for him to show up on dates and hoping for a little reassurance from him that he cares for her. It’s a May-December romance that doesn’t seem to make either party happy.

There’s a new secretary at the hospital, Vanda Corrin, who displays unexpected medical knowledge at bus crashes. She and Don go way back, as it turns out; they were in med school together, and she is repeatedly described as one of the best medical minds of her generation—more brilliant even than Don—though a poor outcome with a pediatric patients has prompted her to give up her license, even though she was exonerated by the medical board. Don spends a lot of time with her, begging her to return to medicine, which naturally disconcerts his fiancée. Though he reassures nervous Sue that there is nothing between him and Vanda, when the two attend a medical conference in Paris, they have too many brandies, and before you know it they are smooching in a taxi.

However, young Sue has other options, as well. The young doctor Bill Stevens tells her repeatedly that he’s in love with her, is always asking her what’s wrong when she’s looking glum, makes himself available to her, and doesn’t pressure her very often to marry him instead of Don. So naturally she doesn’t think of him as anything more than a good friend. He’s concerned she’ll never respect him because, during a crisis when a significant portion of the medical staff has sampled the cafeteria’s canned meat for lunch and is carried off with food poisoning, Bill is called to perform a tracheotomy on a patient who neglected to put on her glasses and so swallowed a wasp, which has caused her throat to swell up like a balloon. He loses his nerve, and Vanda, who happens to be passing by at just the right moment, seizes the scalpel and saves the day and the patient.

Sue is unique among the VNRN heroines I’ve met to date in that she’s not a very good nurse. On one of his dates with her, Bill decides to himself that Sue is “competent and reliable, but she lacked that little extra ‘something’ that a girl needed to be really outstanding in her handling of patients. No, she’d be far better off to marry and have a family.” At the end of the book, when Sue finally does quit to get married (I won’t tell you to whom), her supervisor says, “Usually when I hear one of my younger nurses proposes to leave to be married, I’m extremely sorry. … But, in the case of Nurse Woodford, I must confess I don’t mind very much. I never thought nursing was for her a vocation and no girl makes a good nurse unless it is.”

That one of the main characters is a woman doctor is also something of a novelty. And while virtually every other VNRN insists on examining its male doctor’s hands, here it’s Vanda who is described as having hands that are “long and slender, with an odd strength about them. Capable hands. Perhaps a surgeon’s hands.”

Ring for the Nurse is a pleasant little book. Sue Woodford is, as far as heroines go, a bit of an annoying dishrag, but she does pull herself together for the final crisis, which involves dropping onto a ship from a helicopter and assisting with an emergency appendectomy. And we do have the brilliant Vanda as a counterpoint—even if she, too, is a bit spineless, chucking medicine at the first sign of trouble. (In fairness, our male heroes aren’t without fault, either, between Don’s undiagnosed depression and Bill’s losing his nerve over a fairly simple procedure.) The book on the whole is an enjoyable read, even if there isn’t a whole lot there to make it truly great. It’s not as good as its cover, but it’s worth the hour or two it will take you to buzz through it.