Society Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. Adela Maritano), ©1975
Cover illustration by Allan Kass 

Love sick. That’s what pretty Nurse Nina Bateman was, though she knew handsome, wealthy, dedicated Doctor Mark Danover was way out of her league. Then Mark asked her to take a private case, caring for a beautiful young heiress, Cindy Calvert, who happened to be Mark’s next-door neighbor. Was he looking for a competent nurse, or, as his manner suggested, was there something more behind Mark’s request? Everything seemed wonderful, until Nina met Cindy and her domineering mother. Nina realized before introductions were over that she couldn’t stand the haughty Mrs. Calvert. And what was worse, Mrs. Calvert made it obvious she thought Mark would make the perfect husband for Cindy! How could Nina compete for her heart’s desire against the ambitious scheming of her lovely young patient’s overpowering mother?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“I’m surprised at you. I thought that line went out with starched collars and the five-cent cup of coffee.” 

“A man who told you that he loved you should also believe in you.”

“I was furious. Hurt and furious about you letting that creep make a pass at you.”

REVIEW:
Some authors inspire certain feelings the minute you pull one of their books off the shelf. Jeanne Judson inspires a contented smile, Peggy Gaddis an exasperated sigh, and Jane Converse an anticipatory giggle. And when we have her Society Nurse open before us, we will giggle aplenty. Nurse Nina Bateman lives with her unloving mother in a rundown section of Chicago’s North Side, where she works at a clinic for the downtrodden.  There, two glorious afternoons a week, the godlike Dr. Mark Danover, who lives in a different sort of North Shore suburb, comes to work for free at the clinic, but he is not the sort to brag; “He was doing something he wanted to do and saw no reason to be praised for doing it.” So yes, Nina is in love with Dr. Mark, but “there was no encouragement to be found in his warm smiles, his thoughtful gestures, or even from his complimentary remark,” because “he was uniformly pleasant to everyone.” A rare find in a VNRN, a love interest who is genuinely a good man. Sigh … 

One day, though, Nina and Mark get to talking after a long, hard day, when she reveals she is one of the kids from the ’hood, and that she spends most of her evenings home alone with a book. “Nina thrust her chin up in the air. ‘I happen to like good books.’” And I happen to like Nina! Naturally Mark seems to, too, and asks her out to dinner—and then ruins it by saying he wanted to talk to her about a private case he’s hoping she’ll take on because the patient is a 17-year-old girl with diabetes, and Nina is so well-versed in endocrinology. Also, the patient is a very special friend of Mark’s, and his next-door neighbor. Of course she agrees, thinking she’s likely to see him more often—but the case turns out to be more than she expected.

Poor little rich girl Cindy Calvert is the sweetest little naif with a penchant for saying things like, “Oh, wow, Miss Bateman!” Cindy also has a penchant for Dave Tolson, another poor kid who is putting himself through medical school by mowing Dr. Mark’s lawn—how quaint! But Cindy’s mother Faye is one of those classic divas with “dark eyelashes that were too long and too upswept to belong to their present owner,” who “surveyed Nina as though she were examining a somewhat questionable pot roast.” The only reason Nina gets the job is that she is recommended by Dr. Mark, and Faye has her eye on Dr. Mark as the future Mr. Cindy Calvert, though he clearly has nothing but avuncular feelings for the young girl almost half his age.

So in moves Nina, where she has front row seats to witness Faye’s attempts to “keep Cindy in a state of perpetual childhood,” forbidding her to leave the house, exercise, see friends or especially that Dave Tolson, all because of her disease. “Yet, if anyone who lived here was sick, it was the woman who had made a bright, aesthetically lovely, completely lovable girl see herself as a burden—someone to be ashamed of.” Nina spends her days counting the calories in Cindy’s diet, measuring out and delivering insulin shots, testing blood sugar, and trying to instill a spine into sad, brainwashed Cindy, who is gushingly grateful to the mother who is trying to convince her that she’s “a burden, she should be grateful that people cared about her at all. It had taken years of conditioning to make the girl accept this self-effacing state; the results would not be undone in a few short conversations with a newly engaged R.N.” But liberate Cindy is what Nina cannot help but try to do, and spends afternoons giving her pep talks about her rights.

Needless to say, Nina soon tangles with the imperious Faye, who has told the household staff to tell Cindy’s beau Dave that she’s not available when he calls, but Nina has answered the phone and passed it to Cindy. Summoned to Faye’s lair for a scolding, Nina tries to explain that relationships are good for Cindy, but Faye calls out Nina (somewhat rightly) for overstepping what she knows to be the rules in a house where she is only an employee. Nina, bless her, stands up for herself, saying, “I don’t consider myself a member of your household staff, Mrs. Calvert. I have a degree in nursing. I’d like to be respected as a professional.” Unfortunately, the conversation goes south from there, as Faye calls Nina “common, cheap, conniving” and Nina shouts, “You’re the coldest, the cruelest, the most selfish excuse for a human being I’ve ever met!” And guess who is walking through the door at that moment?

Mark is appropriately shocked. “Frankly, I’m astonished. Name calling! It seems so beneath you,” he tells Nina, but to keep Cindy from falling to pieces at losing one person in her life who cares about her, he convinces the shouting women to give it another try. “If I make any radical changes now, Cindy is liable to run off with that absurd thing with the freckles,” acquiesces the gracious Faye. But it isn’t long before the ladies are back at it, as Faye starts preaching the gospel that her young, gold-digging boyfriend, Reverend Ronald Perry, espouses—that you can cure disease with your mind. (The ever-sassy Nina remarks, when he attempts to sell her his snake-oil theories, “You don’t mind if they keep the surgical wards at County open? A ruptured appendix can be such a nuisance to someone who doesn’t know all you do.”) Faye follows this up by insisting that Nina reveal her true colors—that she’s angling to win Mark for herself. Nina has just admitted that she’s in love with Mark when the man himself walks in—what a knack he has for showing up at awkward moments! He asks Nina if it’s true, and good for her, she replies, “That I love you? I’m not ashamed of that. What if I do?”

Of course it turns out that he loves her too, and there’s a lot of smooching then. But true love never sails smooth in a vintage nurse romance novel, and soon the boyfriend Ronald is assaulting Nina just as Faye walks in—obviously taking lessons from Mark about when to make an entrance. Ron, unphased, tries to salvage what woman he can by insisting, “You must have enjoyed that as much as I did,” to which Nina replies, “I haven’t been so thrilled since my dentist told me I’d have to have root canal work.” But Faye runs straight to Mark, who refuses to hear what Nina has to say about what happened, and she is promptly fired by the cold-faced pair.

Then she’s back working at the old clinic when a stricken Dave Tolson turns up, telling Nina that Mark is out of town at a conference and he is sure that Faye has fired the new nurse and embarked Cindy on a faith-healing treatment plan prescribed by Ronald, and he’s certain that Cindy has lapsed into a diabetic coma. Off sprints Nina to the rescue—will she get there in time? And if she manages to save Cindy, can she cure Mark of his stupidity as well?

Of course she can—she’s a smart, strong, spicy Jane Converse heroine. The writing is sprinkled with Jane Converse’s excellent bon mots, and the characters are enjoyable. If Faye Calvert is too easily dismissed as “whacked out” and insane—it would have been less simplistic and condescending to deal with her as what she is, a deeply troubled, insecure woman who would imperil her daughter to try to keep her man, and there are plenty of people like that in the world—that’s the biggest flaw of an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable book.

Nurse at the Cedars

 By Peggy Gaddis, ©1964

He took Susan to his private island to be his private nurse. The old gentleman had only two weeks to live when Dr. Scott Murdock gave him a new wonder drug. Then it looked like he might pull through—and Doctor Scott and Nurse Susan began to find they had more than medicine in common. The country doctor had won the heart of the city nurse. But when greedy relatives, who expected their rich uncle to die, found him convalescing instead—real trouble rocked the little island!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Relax, Merrill. I’ve had breakfast, and I rarely gobble up nurses before lunch. You are perfectly safe.” 

“If just one more white-clad individual comes at me with a treatment tray and a needle big enough to vaccinate a horse, I’m not going to be responsible for my actions!”

“There’s two schools of thought about raising kids. One was to bring ’em up the way they ought to be; and the other was just to let the FBI handle it later on.”

REVIEW:
My copy of this book was sent to me by a reader of this blog, so the first thing I have to say is Thank you Joanne, for thinking of me! Secondly, I am relieved that Peggy Gaddis here has produced something she’s not often capable of—a good book. Here we find Susan Merrill nursing Mr. Cantrell, a rich man of 68 at a hospital in Atlanta when he decides he would prefer to go home to his estate on an island off the coast of Georgia to die—he has subacute bacterial endocarditis (and there’s an overly dense explanation of the disease that seems like it was lifted from a medical textbook for you to wade through) and has two weeks to live. Of course, he’s decided to take Susan with him as his nurse.

There she meets Dr. Scott Murdock, who is called “Dr. Murdock” throughout the book, even during tender scenes between him and Susan. He is an orphan (Susan, of course, is, too) whose education, residency and present clinic in town were all arranged and paid for by Mr. Cantrell, so since the gentleman’s diagnosis he has been burning the midnight oil researching treatments and has come across an experimental medication that might prolong his life by years, and he persuades Mr. Cantrell to try it.

Then the expected happens: Two greedy nephews and a niece show up, hoping to witness their relative expiring before their eyes and leaving them all the dough, and they are not at all pleased to find the old man is recovering! As Susan and Dr. Scott endeavor to cure the old man while protecting him from his family, they naturally and perfunctorily fall in love as the book hits the halfway point, and 14 pages later Susan essentially proposes. “I should have waited for you to propose to me, all formal and everything, I suppose. I guess I—well, sort of jumped the gun, didn’t I?” Given that they’ve only known each other two weeks, um, yes, you did, honey. But it’s actually a nice change from Gaddis’ usual method of the heroine becoming deeply hurt and insulted over her man’s inability to declare a love she has blindly refused to see.

To be honest, not much happens for a bit, though there’s a lot of flurry with the relatives and the insinuation that one of them might resort to murder, but it never comes to that—the old man conveniently drops of a stroke, as you knew he had to. Now there’s just the reading of the will, and you can probably guess the outcome of that scene, which concludes with Susan slapping the niece! Unfortunately this scene occurs only on page 102, and the rest of the book is a bit of a slog, with many characters coming and going from the house and long discussions about the various lawsuits that will follow, but though this does bring the book down somewhat, overall it is still a good one for Gaddis. The heroine really is a strong character who doesn’t metamorphose into a silly kitten the minute her man is near, and indeed when he tries to send her back to Atlanta, she refuses to go and tells him, “Hush trying to give me orders.” Gaddis does like to latch on to words—here someone is speaking “huskily” or “nodding soberly” every page of the first chapter, but she seems to have decided to reach for her thesaurus as the book progresses. Overall, it’s a satisfying achievement for Ms. Gaddis, so if you are curious to see what she can do when she’s firing on most cylinders, Nurse at the Cedars is not a bad opportunity to find out.

Million Dollar Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1966
Cover illustration by Darrell Greene 

When pretty Dorothy Malloy left Buttrick Hospital to become wealthy Andrew Bossart’s private nurse, her orderly world changed overnight. Young and handsome, Andrew Bossart was recovering from an accidental gunshot wound. His reputation as a dangerous ladies’ man made some people wonder if the shot had been an accident after all … Despite Dorothy’s determination to remain uninvolved, she was too attractive a girl to escape Bossart’s attention—and too good a nurse to ignore the needs of her patient. Before long she found herself entangled in an unexpected mystery, a strange romantic triangle—and a scandal that would rock the city …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“There’s more to conversation than attractive legs.” 

“Even a hospital should be hospitable.”

“Like all career girls, you get flustered when someone behaves like you’re human.”

“I don’t think it helps a man’s innards when a bullet is shot into them.”

“There are proper and improper ways to go about achieving a desired object. You learn that quickly in surgery. You don’t incise down from the shoulder to remove an appendix. Similarly, you don’t club someone in order to reason with him.”

“In our special ways we’re all ill.”

REVIEW:
Author William Neubauer, here writing as Rebecca Marsh, is one of my favorites. His plots are usually more intricate, and his heroines are smart, hard-working, sassy gals who put up with little nonsense. The problems with his books are that the romance part of the book is usually just crammed in around the margins, barely visible; the plots can sometimes get overly confusing; and the boyfriend is sometimes not especially desirable. Here he has done pretty well, as the plot is mostly navigable, but he did stick us with a middling man. At least we scored an amazing cover illustration.

Dorothy Malloy is a surgical nurse at Neubauer’s classic Buttrick Hospital—this noble, California coast–institution has hosted at least three other of his VNRNs (TV Nurse, Pam Green Rehabilitation Nurse, and Recovery Room Nurse) and some peripheral characters in this story (Dr Lee Vaughan, with whom Dorothy lunches one day, for example, is the alleged hero of TV Nurse) are stars in other books, which is a fun bonus for the die-hard Neubauer fan. She is an ambitious lass, hoping to be promoted to assistant chief—and her ambition is viewed with some skepticism around the hospital, because why would a woman want to be promoted?

Anyway, she’s called to special Andrew Mark Bossart, a devilishly handsome playboy who has gotten himself mixed up with Lisa Locatelli, a 17-year-old student nurse at Buttrick, as well as Catherine Cowell, the owner of a large corporation in town. The young gal swears Andy proposed to her, but then dumped her for the wealthy Catherine, so she calls Catherine to give her the down-low about Andy’s sneaky dealings, and then tries to kill herself—but is saved due to fast action on the part of her nursing school roommate. Catherine calls Andy over to her beach house—and the next we see him, he’s on the OR table with a bullet in his gut, and Dorothy is part of the team commissioned to dig it out and repair the damage.

She’s then transferred to the recovery ward unit (unfortunately we didn’t cross paths with Jane Kemp while we were there) to special Andy—but this puts her out of the running for a promotion, because “in the surgical suite she had status, even a type of seniority. Logically, the longer she remained there, the better her chances would be to make the jump to rank as a junior executive. But if she were popped into a recovery-room suite, she’d be the low girl in an area where promotions were few and far between.” The transfer is happening, we learn, because the chief of the surgical unit, Miss Sipsie, is dating Joe Elyot, an orthopedic tech, who is also seeing Dorothy, whom he might possibly prefer.

The head of the recovery room, Clara Dendrock, likewise recommends that Dorothy should be transferred to another department. Clara, it turns out, is upset that Dorothy didn’t sign a petition like all the other nurses opposing the expulsion of Lisa Locatelli, who has been deemed too unstable to go on with a nursing career. Dorothy has been one of Lisa’s chief mentors, so her “betrayal” of Lisa doesn’t sit well with the other nurses, but Dorothy is an astute player, and has already discussed her opinion that Lisa should be allowed to continue with Mrs. Dolezal, the superintendent of nurses, and feels that signing the petition might undercut her chances for promotion and won’t accomplish Lisa’s reinstatement.

Caring for Andy Bossart, Dorothy has a front-row seat to the drama. Though there is no proof that Catherine shot Andy—the gun has not been recovered, without which she apparently cannot be arrested—Andy, who’d been working a high-paying job ($25,000 a year!!!) at Catherine’s company is suing Catherine for a million dollars for loss of his career and, oh yeah, that hole in his gut. When he’s finally out of the hospital, he invites Dorothy to dinner to thank her for her hard work—but has also invited Catherine and the local newspaper columnist, Millicent Haight, to the party, and Catherine beans Dorothy on the head, giving her a black eye. This injury—plus her current political situation at the hospital—leads Mrs. Dolezal to give Dorothy two weeks off to recover, and Catherine, out of gratitude that Dorothy has not pressed charges, offers Catherine use of her beach cottage—the house where Andy was shot—to recover.

There she has lovely meals and walks on the grounds, sails on Catherine’s yacht, and pleasant conversations with Catherine’s housekeeper, who is another of the locals deeply devoted to Catherine—like Dorothy’s boyfriend, Joe Elyot, who was rescued from a life in the slums when Catherine, a high school classmate, offered to pay for his schooling to fit him for the job he currently holds.

Eventually all the threads are neatly tied up—the story of what happened to the gun, the alibi that is going to get Catherine off the hook for the shooting, Lisa’s reinstatement at the hospital, and Dorothy’s career—in a manner that is mostly understandable. We even wrap up Dorothy’s love life when she announces out of the blue—many Neubauer women have this annoying habit—that she is going to marry Joe. While we are certainly happy for almost everyone, and for Dorothy’s clever playing of her career and hospital politics, I wasn’t too please to see her end up with Joe.

Joe is clearly very devoted to Catherine out of gratitude for her help—to the extent that he helps fabricate her alibi and plant false evidence, basically abetting a felony assault—but he starts out the book as something of a cad, telling Dorothy on a date that he’d kissed Catherine once and dates other women, Miss Sipsie in particular. This hurts Dorothy’s feelings, so “he condescended to lean forward quickly and give her left cheek a greasy peck. As she drew back, flushing, he laughed.” It’s so amusing to be a jerk! Later he tells Dorothy that he’s chatted with several nurses who are upset with her about the petition business and that he’d defended her “because I like you,” but then complains that feeling like he wants to defend her can push him into marriage, and he doesn’t want to get married—and somehow Dorothy takes this for a compliment, but then gets mad when he tries to persuade her to sign the petition instead of supporting her decision. Next time we see him, he’s hanging out at the beach house with Dorothy and sighing that he should have tried to marry Catherine. Two pages after that, she decides to marry him while he’s not even present. So you see we don’t have a lot to admire in him.

Another odd thing about the book is that both Catherine and Andy end up getting inpatient psychiatric care—but Lisa, the would-be suicide who clearly needs it way more than anyone, does not. Instead, everyone refers to her suicide attempt as a “goof” that she shouldn’t be punished for. Overall, though, as I have said, this is a brisk, interesting, enjoyable book with an excellent heroine to admire. If William Neubauer here has not given us his best work, it's still better than most VNRNs out there, and easily worth an afternoon of your time.

The Dilemma of Geraldine Addams

By Diane Frazer, ©1965
(pseud. Dorothy Fletcher)
Cover illustration by Harry Bennett 

“Let’s have it,” Dr. Brownlee said to Henry Franklin, a very influential member of the Board of Trustees of Cranston Hill Hospital, with a wife who was an important member of the Women’s Auxiliary.
“Well, this newspaper fellow came to see Clara, and it seems you have someone on the staff here who shouldn’t be on the staff of any self-respecting hospital.”
“You mean one of our doctors?” Brownlee asked, suddenly alert.
“Not a doctor. A nurse. Geraldine Addams.”
Dr. Brownlee sat up straight. “Geraldine Addams? What about her?”
“I gather that she was a pretty notorious playgirl, that she posed for some rather startling photographs, that she was even involved in a hit-and-run accident. You wouldn’t want to retain someone like that on your nursing staff I’m sure, Lyman. Seems she’s in the children’s ward. It’s not the best of situations is it?”

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Everybody has to fight, Gerry. Life is struggle. Life, as the saying goes, is total war. We all find that out as time goes by.” 

REVIEW:
Dorothy Fletcher is one of my favorite authors. If she has penned a few duds that bring down her overall average (she didn’t even make it onto the Best Authors list of the 2022 VNRN Awards), she is a smart, smooth and witty author who can really deliver a solid book. As she has here. 

Geraldine Addams is a nurse on the pediatric ward, and when we meet her, she is delivering medications to her young charges but calling them cocktails—OK, so maybe not so politically correct these days, but still funny!—little Pete gets a gin fizz, Linda gulps her bloody Mary, Susan quaffs a martini. She’s called out by the mean and stodgy spinster nurse Polly Sauerwein, who deserves her name, but Gerry hotly retorts that the kids already knew the drink names, and it makes medications so much easier to take!

We soon learn that Gerry is “not only a competent nurse, and adored by the children, with whom she ‘had a way,’ she was as well a strikingly attractive girl, an extremely well-bred young lady, educated, posed, with faultless manners.” She hails from a wealthy background, schooled in Europe’s finest finishing schools, but when a scandal forced her to re-evaluate her life, and finding “that she was thoroughly fed up with an idle, careless life,” she took up nursing “to prove something to herself.”

She’s been assigned to a very delicate case, that of young Marsha Marston, who has a congenital heart defect and is to undergo major open-heart surgery with talented, tortured Dr. Paul Massey, but Marsha needs to rebuild her strength before she can tolerate the surgery. Gerry instantly wins over young Marsha—and Dr. Massey as well, who calls her one night to come to his house urgently. What could he want!?!

Turns out his wife, Gladys, has come home from New York early and is badly inebriated. He has to leave for a conference in Washington immediately, and he asks Gerry to stay with his wife overnight. But Nurse Polly calls the doctor’s house and recognizes Gerry’s voice on the phone—and immediately runs to the nursing supervisor with salacious stories about Gerry and Paul. Gerry, called on the carpet, refuses to spill the beans about Paul’s alcoholic wife, in part because she recognizes her own guilt. “Between them there was something very strong, only that was not what Mrs. Cranston meant. Mrs. Cranston meant that had they gone to bed together, and that, perhaps, was the lesser sin.” Her case isn’t helped by a new patient who turns out to be a paparazzo, with photos of Gerry from her old days and access to the old newspaper stories. He’s ready to blackmail her, but she refuses, so his stories are added to the gossip, and Gerry’s job—and little Marsha’s health, possibly her life, are on the line!

It must be confessed that the book plays out pretty much as you know it will, but the fun is getting there. And I did appreciate that despite the rather scandalous cover, the illustration really reveals more than the story does about Gerry’s past sins. Here again Dorothy Fletcher has created a sweet, enjoyable story with delightful characters—even if they’re not all nice people. Dorothy doesn’t always deliver a great book, but she does know how to build one—and if Geraldine Addams is having a dilemma, I am not when it comes to recommending this book.

To Please the Doctor

By Marjorie Moore, ©1950
Also published as Borne on the Wind 

Dr. Duncan McRey was a most difficult person, thought Jill Fernley, and almost as bad was Brenda Malling, her staff nurse. Jill loved her work in St. Joseph’s Hospital, but hated the intrigues and friction of community life. Brenda was jealous of Jill’s success, but why, oh! why had Dr. McRey to be so unfriendly to nurses when he was so gentle with children? Was he like that to all women? This was a question which came to concern Jill more and more before at last she found the answer.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“As a sex, I’m sure he regards us nurses as a uniformed race, necessary components to the running of a hospital, and divided into two groups, the efficient and the fools.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Jill Fenley has just left her post in a London hospital to take a promotion to the pediatrics ward head nurse in a rural seacoast village. She had been persuaded of the desirability of this location by her friend Dr. Harriet Laine, who had assured her that the hospital was awesome, it was a great job, and everyone there was super nice. Almost everything about that turned out to be true—except that last bit. The two people she interacts with most, her main staff nurse Brenda Malling and chief surgeon Dr. Duncan McRey, are spectacularly unimpressed by Jill, and this makes life a tad difficult, essentially because Brenda simply despises Jill and goes out of her way to sabotage her. Brenda, you see, had been made temporary ward chief, and had hoped that she herself would be appointed to fill the post—and it doesn’t help that the intern Brenda has her eye on, Dr. Philip Traven, is an old friend of Jill’s. Philip immediately starts dating Jill, though the pair are “just jolly good friends, and you know it perfectly well!” she laughs when he suggests that he “was always a bit goofy about you.” She’s lonely, and so is happy for the cheerful company, even if this does further dampen her relationship with Brenda.

Dr. McRey is naturally one of those men who is “a brilliant man. A bit tricky to work for perhaps—Duncan McRey is difficult. He hasn’t much time for the social graces—or women. I tell you he lives for his work,” Harriet explains, adding that she herself gets on marvelously with him, though initially he had been upset at the idea of working alongside a woman doctor. Jill and Duncan meet for the first time at Harriet’s house, when the town is enshrouded with a soupy fog too dangerous to drive in, leaving Harriet stuck at the hospital and the doctor takes refuge at Harriet’s house, which happened to be near when the fog rolled in. Jill knows who he is, but he does not recognize her name as that of the new hire, and he sees only a wealthy young woman—she is actually the stepdaughter of a knight who owns a large estate—and when Jill’s efforts to fix dinner in an unfamiliar kitchen go awry, he is convinced of her uselessness.

So when he meets her at the ward the next day, and Brenda has done nothing to prepare Jill for rounds or the ways of the ward or even where the band-aids are kept—not to mention jostling her arm at the wrong moment so Jill drops a glass container that shatters everywhere—he is completely convinced that she is hopeless. But despite his disdain for her, Jill can’t help noticing “the undeniable attraction this man possessed.” Harriet agrees, saying, “Underneath that hard exterior he is considerate, almost gentle, and I envy the girl he chooses to share his life.”

Through her difficult days and relationships, Jill is aided by her consistent demonstration of a backbone. “Average females, as you call them, are neither hysterical nor are they incapable,” she retorts when Duncan suggests the opposite. And when they end up on a walk by the sea on a windy day—Jill is refreshed by the battle with the elements—she tells him that she is acutely aware that as a nurse “she fell far short of his standards,” but she refuses to rat out Brenda, thinking that would not improve her case with either party. Duncan suggests that since she is rich and doesn’t need to work, she might resign, since “nursing is a serious profession and meant for serious people.” She snaps, “Do you imagine that I am just playing at a job because the uniform is becoming, that I believed nursing consisted of holding the patient’s hand and whispering words of sweet consolation to the sick? I took up nursing because I wanted to. I’m interested and I love it! Is there any reason why, just because I happen to have private means, that I should be denied the work I want to do?” But she adds, “I know that you have had every right to be disappointed in me,” and he clearly appreciates both her spunk and her honesty.

But depressed by Duncan’s disappointment and her endless failures to surmount Brenda’s antagonism or sabotage, she writes a letter of resignation, leaving it in her desk drawer while she thinks it over. Brenda finds the letter and turns it in, but surprisingly Jill refuses to clarify to the administration that the letter was a mistake, stating, “I can’t deny that I wrote the letter; the fact that I changed my mind before handing it in hardly matters. I would not humiliate myself my saying I wanted to change my mind now.” This point of view is utterly baffling, and since the entire plot depends on this twist, it’s particularly irritating that it is nonsensical. But now the hospital administration makes it clear that Brenda is not going to be promoted into Jill’s job, and Brenda makes a complete about-face. “I don’t dislike you, I never have. If I’m not going to get promotion then I’d rather you stayed than have someone new,” she cries, and now is working hard to make Jill look good and her job easier. Duncan is clearly aware of the dramatic improvement in Jill’s performance, but it’s too late …

The outcome of the book is quite clear from the first chapter, but it’s how you get there that counts. This book gently drifts toward the foregone conclusion, and it’s the interaction of the characters that make the journey pleasant; to quote author Marjorie Moore, “Don’t you realize that it’s the occupants who make the room?” Jill is a strong, independent, dedicated woman who regularly stands up for her beliefs and her integrity; Duncan is honorable and tough but not rigid, and his unbending toward Jill—as he has toward Harriet—is believable and makes him admirable; peripheral character Harriet is smart, stalwart and true. Even Brenda Malling is fun to watch, first as the evil saboteur and then as the newfound friend. The only real problems with this book are the unbelievable plot device that puts Jill out the door, and—the elephant must be addressed—the cover illustration, which makes it appear that the nurse has some randy ideas about how she might please the doctor. But these faults aside, this book is a gentle, pleasant companion for an afternoon, and it certainly pleased this reader.  

Doctor Chris

by Elizabeth Seifert, © 1946

When the new doctor arrived at Lakeside Hospital, the reaction was lively. Nobody had expected Dr. Chris Metcalf to be a girl. The nurses were not pleased, for another young woman meant keener competition for the attention of the handsome Chief of Staff. The Chief of Staff himself was not pleased, for he believed that medicine was for men alone. So Chris had something to fight against, as well as a lot to learn during her year of hospital life. It was anything but a dull year, however, what with this vigorous opposition, with sabotage in an Army Ordnance plant nearby, and with the personable young lawyer in town who appreciated Chris as a woman rather than as a doctor. In her latest novel Elizabeth Seifert shows the development of Chris Metcalf is a person and as a doctor, and adds a vivid new story to her popular group of novels about doctors and the drama of their work. 

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Just so I’m the biggest something in your life, sweetheart.”

REVIEW:
Poor Dr. Chris Metcalf is a 24-year-old intern, having just graduated from medical school, and is arriving at Lakeside Hospital somewhere in Missouri. Of course, the initial joke is that with the nickname of Chris, everyone thinks from her resume that she is a man. What fun when she arrives wearing a skirt! Well, maybe not fun, as she gets the fisheye from multiple mossbacked and/or jealous nurses and doctors, including her new chief, 40-year-old Dr. Key Edmons. (I know, “Key” is about the worst name ever, but it’s not the first time we have met one, and probably won’t be the last, unfortunately.) But Chris is not intimidated: “I’m not frightened of you, and you don’t shock me,” she tells him. “Another thing you can count on, I won’t bother you by falling in love with you.” That shows him! Except maybe not, as he has an exceptional amount of prejudice to overcome, and she is perennially smacking into that wall. Frankly it gets more than a little tiresome to continually encounter remarks such as, “There is something you’re going to have to learn, Dr. Metcalf, though I’m damned if I think you can learn it. Because you’re a girl!” Or, “You didn’t handle the father, and the reason you didn’t is the same reason we have against your trying to be a doctor. You’re a girl.” Honestly, Chris is never going to experience any gender confusion, she is reminded so frequently of hers, though it seems likely that she has progressed through puberty and actually qualifies as a woman.

She does not have much spare time, being an intern and all, but soon Chris has hooked up with a local playboy, 35-year-old attorney Allan Gifford, who is apparently about to be engaged to one wealthy socialite while also having an affair with the chief OR nurse. If that doesn’t make him enough of a catch, he, too, is ridiculously prejudiced against women doctors. “Why should a pretty little girl like you go into anything so gruesome as the practice of medicine?” he asks her when they first meet. He repeatedly pressures her to marry him, but is very open about his insistence that she quit medicine if she does, so she doesn’t really take him seriously.

The book rolls along and we watch Chris tackle with varying degrees of success various medical situations, always carrying the weight of her entire gender on her back. I will say she is a bit on the wimpy side and does have a tendency to break into tears, but the pressure of one’s intern year combined with the accompanying lack of sleep might do that to anyone. She is fierce in her regular and ongoing battles with Dr. Edmons about her capabilities, I will give her that: “Don’t you dare say that’s why I have no business doctoring,” she snaps at him when he tells her that women can’t be doctors because they have “a tender heart.” “Men have tender hearts, too. Don’t they? Don’t they?” (Dr. Edmons, who is obviously falling in love with Chris, begrudgingly admits she may be right.)

Two of the more interesting cases that Dr. Metcalf encounters involve reproductive rights: a young woman, pregnant by a bounder, who asks for an abortion—Chris refuses because it’s illegal and she is only an intern without the requisite skills; it’s not clear which is the bigger obstacle—and in another case a woman who is having her appendix out asks to have her ovaries removed as well. Dr. Edmons refuses to do it because the ovaries are not diseased, but Chris replies that they would take out healthy ovaries during a hysterectomy. The argument is dropped before it progresses, but it is curious that author Elizabeth Seifert introduces these weighty topics in such an offhanded manner.

Eventually, as you knew there would be, there is a case of serious sabotage at the nearby Army ordnance plant in which a plane crashes into it, and Chris and Dr. Edmons work all night to save the burned men. Chris than deduces who the scurrilous foreign agent is—the only character with a German accent (*eyeroll*)—and plays a large role in bringing the criminal to justice, with the help of Allan Gifford, who turns out to be FBI! Unfortunately, “all the glamour Cooper and Hoover have given to the G-men, the aura of Sherlock Holmes—all glimmered about Allen’s big, homely person” and now she thinks she is in love with him and accepts his ring, “the badge of submission, of subordination.” Well, that sounds lovely! Then he is injured in a shooting accident and she saves his life, proving to everyone that she is a “real” doctor—but also to herself that she is not in love with Allan: “Have I got so hard, so unfeeling that I could have done what I did for Allan, if I really loved him—the way I should love him?”

Overall, this is a low-key, satisfying book by an excellent author. It’s not especially exciting or unique, but it is well-written and has a quiet humor in several instances that unfortunately doesn’t translate to the Best Quotes section. It certainly is a slice of life of a young woman trying to forge her way through a career that is difficult today, much less 75 (!!) years ago, and if the incessant prejudice is trying for us to endure, I imagine it was a great deal more so for the brave women who actually lived through it. If this gentle book isn’t the most memorable, it has a pleasant competence that makes it worth reading about Dr. Chris.

Nurse with a Dream

By Norrey Ford, ©1957
Cover illustration by Chapman 

When Jacqueline Clarke came from France to nurse at a Yorkshire hospital she had never known any Englishmen except her father. Soon she was to meet two very attractive ones; her farmer-cousin Guy, who ruled over his broad acres from a centuries-old farmhouse, and the distinguished surgeon of whom nurses spoke in awed whispers as “the great Mr. Broderick.” Guy fell in love and started proposing marriage almost at once, while she wasn’t supposed even to speak to Mr. Broderick—and what a sensation there was when she did! She couldn’t presume to imagine that he would ever give her a serious thought … and yet the idea of him seemed to come persistently between her and Guy.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:
“We’ll make a nurse of you some day. Even if we kill you.”

“We all condemn what we can’t understand.”

“No house is big enough for two women if they don’t agree.”

“He is a doctor, but only just, I’d say. I mean you could still see bits of eggshell and fluff on him.”

“Whoever heard of two weeks’ convalescence, when we’re short-staffed and you’re not actually dying?”

“Only twelve more operating days to Christmas, Nurse?”

“‘He showed me the Charleston. His grandma taught him.’ She rolled down her nylons and proudly displayed blue bruises. ‘Those old-timers must have been tough.’”

“Bad as January was, it rushed all too soon into February, and those nurses taking the examination went about with glazed eyes and moving lips.”

“If you understand children, you understand men, mostly.”

REVIEW:
Jacqueline Clarke is a Cinderella of a nurse. Orphaned during “the war,” she has “warm youth and vitality,” “richly curved red lips and gentian-blue eyes, fine skin as delicate and rosy as a ripe, sun-warmed peach.” Her father was English and her mother French, and she was raised in France her entire life, so though her English is perfect, she speaks with “the slightest trace of accent, just enough to make her sound enchanting to English ears.” I hate perfect heroines; what’s wrong with being a normal, flawed woman? 

Anyway, Jacqueline has returned to Yorkshire, the land of her father, to learn about his home country. She says she’s never met a young Englishman, which seems hard to believe, given that she works in a hospital. Not that it matters; “I’m not interested in men. I just want to be a nurse,” she says. Then we hear about the lion surgeon Dr. Broderick, who “doesn’t care for nurses. He’s a terror and twists their heads off, like eating shrimps.” I’m betting $100 he’s starring on the last page.

On her first weekend off, she takes a trip to the moors to see the farmhouse where her father was raised, and meets a birder named Alan who takes her on a long walk with him. She’s telling him how nice her father was to her, when suddenly she gasps, realizing that “today she had been happy and comfortable with a man who had not talked down to her, or patronised, or treated her as a pretty little woman fit only for flirting; to this man, as to her father, she was a person, with a mind and ideas of her own.” Heady stuff! They talk of love, and he insists, “my love is elsewhere”—perfect grounds for a misunderstanding, as indeed there is one about his identity, which we saw coming half the moor away.

At the farmhouse, she meets her half-cousin Guy, and his mother Connie—her father’s wicked stepmother, who indeed “looked like an earthy troll”—and he is a big, handsome Guy, who makes her pulses race, but you know there has to be someone to interpose. Actually, it’s initially more complicated than that, as, when Jacky takes a stroll on the moor, she spots a dog and is then knocked unconscious. She’s soon found by Alan, however, and carried several miles to the village. She wakes in her own hospital, but the curious twist is that she has lost her memory of the day, and when Alan shows up and chews her out for being irresponsible, as he thinks she had fallen from a steep crag he had warned her about. She is livid, and spars feistily with him, even threatening him with a water jug before he ducks out the door. “As a junior nurse, I’m less than the dust, but as me I won’t be anybody’s doormat,” she declares, winning my heart instantly. And … Alan turns out to be Dr. Broderick! Who would have guessed!?!?

Of course, she can’t believe that a mighty surgeon could like her, even though they have frequent friendly and amusing exchanges. Her confusion is manipulated by Guy’s sister Deborah, who is hankering after Dr. Broderick herself, and she convinces Jacky to agree to marry Guy, so as to avoid subjecting Dr. Broderick to idle gossip that he could be involved with such a lowly creature as herself. “It was so plainly a breach of hospital etiquette to have her life saved by its most eminent surgeon! Perhaps if he had known she was a nurse, he’d have left her lying there, and saved himself and everybody else a great deal of unpleasantness!”

For his part, Guy has been pressing her for her hand—insisting, actually, in the most unpleasant and frankly alarming way. He tells her he’d like to hold her in his hand—“Slowly, keeping his gaze on his palm, he closed his muscular hand till the fingers were pressed down tightly and his knuckles showed white.” Yikes! She valiantly resists: “You can’t just say ‘that’s for me’ as if I were a cake in a confectioner’s window,” she insists, but he does anyway. He doesn’t improve his case when he says, “As if a woman’s career mattered, when she has a chance of marrying!” (To her credit, she laughs in his face, saying, “Do men think they are the be-all and end-all of a woman’s existence? Do you think we’d throw anything over that we cared about, just to marry one of you?”) But she gets flustered when he kisses her, so she wonders, “Was this love, this pounding of the heart, this disturbance of the senses?” Eventually she figures out it’s not, but by then she believes it’s too late to get out of marrying Guy, which is a preposterous manifestation of honor, and I would say that it’s dishonorable to marry a man you don’t love, to yourself and to the gentleman in question.

Anyway, everything sorts out in the end, as you know it will, but the great fun is watching it all unfold. This book has some really lovely people in it, but tops is Jacky’s nurse friend Bridget, who fortunately has to recover from her own stomach troubles in the bed next to Jacky, so we have lots of time to appreciate her sense of humor. Bridget is the kind of pal who, looking down on her cafeteria tray, quips, “When I came off-duty I was hungry enough to eat a dead dog, but I didn’t think I’d have to.” Pretty much everything she says is equally glorious. Initially disappointed with Jacky’s looks, I was quickly won over with her spunk and her ability to stand up for herself, even when facing dragons like Dr. Broderick. I even liked Dr. Broderick, who really was mostly respectful of Jacky, and at one point he berates himself for his hand in the charade that was Jacky’s engagement to Guy in a way that felt honest: “Fool, fool, fool! He had not even tried—not raised a hand to stop her falling into Guy’s grasp. He’d shown too much darn self-sacrifice, too much nobility; in fact, he’d been a stuffed shirt.” The question of who clubbed Jacky over the head is a bit of unnecessary detour for the plot, though it’s not badly done, and I was left wondering until the end, and the reveal offered some interesting insights into minor characters. And the writing! So witty, so amusing, so enjoyable! Writing this good is rare enough that it must be celebrated, and I am happy to pop a cork for Norrey Ford and this lovely book.

The Fledgling Nurses

By Diana Douglas, pseud. of 
Richard Wilkes-Hunter, ©1971
Cover illustration by Allan Kass

“Tina,” John whispered, “I’ve never seen you the way I’m seeing you now.”
“No? I guess you never bothered to look,” she answered. Any second now he was going to kiss her, and most girls would give anything to have such an attractive man look at them as he was looking at her now. But all Tina felt was a diminishing satisfaction that John’s date Dell would see them—that what Dell would feel would be payment for some of the dirty tricks she’d played on Tina at the hospital. John’s kiss was passionate and very, very exciting—too exciting. For when Tina saw Dell staring at them furiously, she knew that what had started out as a simple act of revenge might signal the beginning of a love that would threaten all of them … 

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Inside this hospital, nurses do not run even in an emergency. Running promotes panic. In patients as well as nurses. Remember that.” 

“‘Sometimes it’s like that with people,’ he said. ‘You just look at one another and you vibrate.’”

REVIEW:
Tina Lambert, a second-year nursing student, hates her fellow student Dell Blandon with a burning passion. Dell, who’s at the top of their class, is always ratting out Tina, who is somewhere at the bottom. Tina’s problem is that she has mixed feelings about nursing, mostly stemming from her mother, who is director of nursing at a hospital in Berkeley, California, across the bay from Bayview Hospital, where Tina is a student. “My mother’s more than a trial—she’s a conviction, too,” Tina gripes, adding that it was her mother’s idea that she become a nurse. Honest and self-aware, though, she admits, “I wanted to be a nurse. But I wanted to make my own decision about it, that’s all. I didn’t want to be taken by the ear and led into a nurse’s uniform. Would you?” No, I wouldn’t, and it explains Tina’s attitude and mixed performance as a student. 

One evening Tina and the gang and their men friends go to a club—“It’s now, it’s wow, it’s the Rainbow Pad,” and I laughed for about ten pages at the wild, swinging hippie scene with hypnotic, psychedelic lights and a “depth-perception machine,” whatever that is. Unfortunately, Tina is not able to “swing your hang-ups away!” and instead decides to wreak her revenge on Dell by taking away her boyfriend, John Small. Unfortunately, it’s not very difficult, as John seems too eager to kiss Tina from the moment he lays eyes on her. She lets him do it as she sees Dell exiting the ladies’ lounge, and Dell, furious, leaves the club with Stanfurd playboy Peter Spain. That night, Tina hears Dell sneaking into the nurses’ dorm way past curfew and cry herself to sleep, and—too late—she starts to feel remorse. But it proves difficult to drop John, who now is hypocritically angry with Dell for dating Peter. Eventually, trying to get Dell to go back to John, who Tina is sure still loves Dell, Tina comes completely clean to Dell, in her startlingly honest way. Dell, not very surprisingly, is devastated and humiliated, and thinking that she’s lost the man she loves forever, walks out of the hospital when she should be heading for class.

The next 40 pages devote themselves to a long, drawn-out, day-long hunt all over San Francisco for Dell, ending with Tina, John and two friends driving through the thick fog (you knew the fog would make an appearance at some point) to track her down—only to end up in a car crash, and wouldn’t you know it, the car they hit contains Dell and Peter! Tina, who’s been a hit-or-miss student—though we do hear she’s especially strong on the first aid exam, in a bit of foreshadowing—saves John’s life while the other two student nurses go to pieces, and when the victims are finally wheeled into the ED doors, Tina wins the admiration of chief surgical resident Dr. Roger Carr.

Eventually everything is tied up, but not before Tina pulls a half-hearted Dell maneuver herself and runs into the park after dark and is nearly assaulted before Roger shows up in the nick of time, in a perfunctory 2½-page adventure that feels insulting to the reader. Overall it’s certainly not author Richard Wilkes-Hunter’s worst, which can be pretty bad (see Resort Nurse, Nurse Deceived, Mystery Nurse, and Surfing Nurse, to name just a few—he has definitely earned his berth on the Worst VNRN Authors list). But here he has given us a short story stretched yawningly into 125 pages, and we can’t avoid Wilkes-Hunter’s trademark awkward references to Tina’s “firm breasts” and the shower in which she is “letting the warmth pour down over her smooth young curves,” which make me feel like a creepy voyeur. But Tina is a forthright, insightful, admirable young woman who learns from her ability to perform under pressure that “if I can do that once, I can do it again, can’t I? I mean, I can help people who need what I am able to do for them.” It’s a rarity for Wilkes-Hunter to give us such a feisty and enjoyable heroine, but after wading through 13 of his other books and finding them overwhelmingly to be duds, I am glad to have met her.

The White Jacket

By Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton), ©1961
Cover illustration by Paul Ann Soik 

Vivien loved her surgical work with all the enthusiasm of her temperamental nature. She had been attracted to Johnny Dysart by his even temper and sound common sense. But the arrival of a new and disturbingly attractive member of the staff changed both their lives—and indeed the lives of many of the doctors and nurses at Queen’s Hospital.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Men! she thought angrily. As soon as a woman begins to think for herself they tell her she’s tired. Tired!” 

“Well, if there’s any giving in to be done, I always think it’s best to let the men have the last word, Doctor. They set a lot of store by it. Women know when they’ve won, and they don’t need to have it in black and white the way men do.”

“Nature heals and the doctor only encourages the patient while she does it.”

“Nothing worthwhile ever is simple.”

REVIEW:
It’s interesting to me that when a VNRN has a female doctor protagonist, there is often at least one more woman MD on the staff—but when the book’s heroine is a nurse, almost never do you meet a female doctor. Anyway, here we have Dr. Vivien Bromwich, who is working in an English hospital. From what I can tell she’s finishing her residency, and covers all specialties, though she spends a lot of time in surgery with Dr. Malcolm, her boss and mentor. 

She’s sort of engaged to Johnny Dysart, though it’s not “official,” whatever that means, because “I want to feel a hundred per cent sure,” she tells Johnny. I guess it really means they’re not engaged. Johnny is a cool customer: “It wasn’t easy to tell with Johnny. His comfortable cheerfulness never varied very much. Big and confident, he made her feel safe.” Safe, of course, is not always a promising feature in VNRN men.

The other woman MD in the book, Dr. Rena Todd, is a 36-year-old surgeon in training who is much discussed by the staff. “Too much ambition,” Johnny snorts. “Rena’s determined to be a Great Surgeon—and if she only knew it, she’d probably be a darn sight happier being the Little Woman to some nice chap.” Vivien, to her only partial credit, disagrees, saying, “She’s not a cabbage like me. I don’t want to be a career woman all my life.” Rena, it turns out, has been married and even had a baby, but it had died and her husband had left her. She’s now unable to have children, so she feels “I’m a failure as a woman,” and that’s part of the reason she works so hard at surgery.

On her own career front, Vivien is proving herself in the OR, and Dr. Malcolm asks her to stay on as his registrar, which I think is the British term for fellow. “Wasting your time, working with me, if you’re not going to go on with it,” he points out. When she says she might get married—the horrible inference being that she’ll quit working—he answers, “Any fool can keep house. But you can do surgery.” I love Dr. Malcolm. Discussing the invitation with Johnny, he refuses to even recognize the compliment, much less consider the offer. “I’m a man, and I have to think about having a career and providing for a family. You don’t,” he tells her. “Why can’t he let me glow, just for once?” she wonders.

In her personal life, while she’s waiting to feel 100 percent certain of Johnny—good luck with that—Vivien meets Edward Featherstone, who is working as an OR porter. “Emboldened by the perfect fit of their interlocking glances,” she starts snatching kisses with him in the autoclave room, and her secret smooching leads her to think she shouldn’t marry Johnny. But then she and Johnny are in a car crash, while he’s driving their friend Dr. Dick Clements’ car, and Johnny is badly hurt, requiring the amputation of several fingers. Now surgery as a specialty is out for him—and we’re panicking, thinking she’ll marry him out of pity, but he breaks up with her from his hospital bed. “Now I begin to live my life the way I want to live it,” she thinks, and the freedom in that sentence truly made my heart lift up.

Unfortunately, the insurance won’t pay for Dick’s car, and the book takes a turn into a mystery story. Vivien borrows $200 from Edward Featherstone and gives it to Dick for his car, but then Edward comes to Vivien in a panic and says he needs the money back immediately, as he’s leaving the area in a highly suspicious hurry! Then avuncular Dr. Malcolm is assaulted and dies of a head wound, and Edward has disappeared, and a patient has been robbed of $200, bills he had fortuitously marked in advance. Edward calls Vivien and tells her to leave the $200 in a telephone booth, and then she learns that he is wanted by the police for murdering Dr. Malcolm. While trying to decide what to do, she confides in Dick Clements, who is increasingly but gently making it clear that he has feelings for Vivien. He sends her to the hospital archives, where she learns that Edward was once signing hospital notes as Edward Featherstone Catlow MD, and that he had lost his privileges at the hospital for stealing drugs.

She and Dick go to the police, who are supposed to surveil the telephone booth after Vivien drops off a fake envelope, but they seem to have gone for doughnuts at the crucial moment because one of the OR nurses is discovered knocked out in the telephone booth and the envelope is gone. Vivien and Dick then head for the coffee shop, but it turns out that the bill Vivien uses to pay the tab is one of the stolen bills! Dick stands by her as she’s questioned by the police—who now think she was the one who knocked out the nurse. “If you’re in it, Viv, I have to be in it too, until it works out,” Dick tells her. “I’m with you.” He’s the kind of person who sees she’s troubled and pulls her aside for a talk. “His quiet strength was unbearably moving to her, the more so for its silence. He put an arm across her shoulder and waited. It was clear that he was prepared to wait all night, if necessary, for her to confide in him.” Well, I was won over!

The mystery is wrapped up, not in the way I’d imagined, but it does turn out that Vivien is innocent after all! This book is a little above the usual, with a mystery that actually is one in some places, solid writing, fine characters, and luscious ball gowns. If we are subjected to the usual sexism that the heroine doesn’t work especially hard to shrug off, she doesn’t completely accept it, either, and lives her life in an honest, forthright way—with a little help from her friends. Olive Norton, here writing as Kate Norway, is quickly becoming a trusted source for an enjoyable, pleasant read, and I am happy to have found her, and this charming book.

Office Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1960

Gerry Staley, R.N. loved the sleek elegance of the society doctor’s office but her conscience told her there was more to nursing then caring for the imagined ills of the rich. Then, when diamond-in-the-rough Tom Covert demanded an answer and self-confident Dr. John Driscoll asked her to wear his ring, Gerry knew she must make the decision that would influence the rest of her life.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Ho, for the old days, when the blacksnake whip could be summoned to teach you your duty.”

“Aren’t we a bit formal this morning? The first sir is acceptable, of course. It establishes your respect for my skill, my position, and my bankroll. But once you have established that, Staley, you mustn’t belabor the point.”

“Well, you don’t always look forty, Boss. On day like this, with that look in your eye, you look maybe thirty-nine.”

“The man should always be allowed to think he’s doing the chasing.”

“Ah, have a good cry, Staley; it’ll clean out the ducts just fine.”

“‘Will you tell me why so many men are so idiotic?’
“‘Girls,’ he explained solemnly. ‘They do that to us, for some reason.’”

REVIEW:
Gerry Staley is a 23-year-old nurse working in the posh office of fortyish Dr. John Driscoll. It’s a well-paying job and one that she enjoys, but at book’s open she is talked into helping a young man she knew growing up in the slums who has made a stupid mistake and robbed a jewelry store. She testifies for the young man’s defense, but this means that she needs to come clean with Dr. Driscoll, who is unaware of her upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks. Upon learning this about her, he magnanimously agrees to keep her in her position after “he checked up on you all over town before he graciously agreed to retain the best nurse he’s ever had”—though you’d think the fact that he’s worked alongside her for more than a year would acquaint him to her character. This is just the start of a long line of dominoes that tumble following this one seemingly in significant act in a plot that is fairly typical of author William Neubauer—not that there’s anything terribly wrong with that. 

Gerry is dating ambitious and successful salesman Tom Covert, but she has a crush on Dr. Driscoll, and apparently everyone in town knows it, including Tom. Nonetheless, she continues to see Tom, even though “he wasn’t John Driscoll, of course. He had neither John’s handsomeness nor John’s suave wit. Yet with Tom, at least, she could always be herself.” Interestingly, if Gerry likes him, everyone else in town thinks Dr. Driscoll is “a greedy, money-chasing, social-climbing guy.” The objection seems to be that he doesn’t take enough pro bono shifts: “The only time your fellow goes to the slums it’s a great big show,” Tom tells Gerry. “There’s the limousine sparkling like this bauble. There you are in a spanking fresh uniform and your red-lined cape. Everyone knows you’re there doing charity work. Only it isn’t charity work, because your fellow gets his compensation in the form of publicity.”

Dr. Driscoll seems to live up to the town’s idea of him when, in an attempt to rid himself of his girlfriend Iris Preston, who he feels is getting too serious, the good doctor asks Gerry to pretend that the two are engaged, and he’ll pay her to go out with him a couple times a week. As much as Gerry would love to be with Dr. Driscoll, she is outraged by his proposal. “Did you honestly think, Dr. Driscoll, that I’d help you play such a rotten trick on any woman?” she shouts. “What a strange, pathetic man you are!” She’s summarily fired, but has a new job in five minutes in the hospital emergency department.

Meanwhile, Tom is working on a plan to buy in on a local food distribution business, which he thinks he can leverage into great profits. But he needs $25,000 to swing the deal, and the bank will not lend him the money outright. He asks Gerry to use her connection with Iris, since her dad is also the bank’s president, to influence a positive decision on the loan. So now, with more free time on her hands, Gerry meets with Iris and puts in a plug for Tom’s business. Iris, though, insists on the truth about why Gerry isn’t working for Dr. Driscoll any more—and Gerry gives it to her. “And that, Iris thought weakly, would teach her to do less snooping in the future!” Iris agrees to promote the loan with her father and rushes out the door to see Dr. Driscoll, in a scene that is played offstage.

A few days later Gerry bumps into Dr. Driscoll in the ED, and he tells her that what he really wants is to start a free clinic, and has even purchased a building in the poor section of town; all his money-grubbing ways are so he can amass a pile of money to open the clinic. When Gerry tells Tom about this, he suggests that if Dr. Driscoll really wants to raise money for the clinic, he should undertake a fund-raising campaign, so Gerry suggests he run one, since he’s such a great salesman—and since it’s not likely he’s going to get the loan from the bank. If he succeeds at fund-raising, she suggests, he’s likely to get his seed money from other sources. Sure enough, the campaign is successful, Dr. Driscoll lends Tom the money, and Gerry goes back to work for Dr. Driscoll. Suddenly, though, Gerry is saying to an old friend, “Surely you don’t imagine for an instant that I’d marry Dr. John Driscoll? I’m fond of him, sure, but as a girl might be fond of a rather nice if strange older brother. Lord, it’s always been Tom.” News to us!

Everything ties up very nicely, as you imagine it will. The writing is wonderfully amusing, and there is a terrific character in the person of the Superintendent of Nurses, who has marshalled Gerry along with tough love through her training and now career, and the two regularly meet to trade witticisms, much to our benefit. Dr. Driscoll, also, has a marvelous way with words, à la another personal favorite, author Alan Jackson, who wrote as Rosie M. Banks. “There are times, Iris, and this is one of them, when a man wants the companionship of a full-blown woman,” he says in one lovely example of his eloquence. “Even the cave man was unhappy if there wasn’t a cave woman to grunt her admiration when he’d slain some prehistoric beast. Do grunt your admiration, there’s a pet.”

Gerry is a strong, determined, intelligent, hard-working, top-notch nurse, and not one to fall swooning into anyone’s arms; in fact, she is quite hard to get, right to the bitter end. The only trouble with this story is that you will at times struggle to keep up with the intricacies of the plot, as is customary with Mr. Neubauer, but that’s certainly no reason to shun his books. Rather, it’s a treat to see a VNRN writer who actually puts in an effort to construct a story that you haven’t read fifty times before, and in Office Nurse we have a smart, witty little gem that you could actually read several times and still get something more out of it every time.

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There Came a Surgeon

By Hilda Pressley, ©1964

Another child’s toy, another girl’s boy, it was all the same to Elvira. Whatever Alison had, Elvira had to try and snatch it from her—even to the extent of becoming a nurse in Alison’s hospital. And Alison never realized how much she minded Elvira until Steven Hartley joined the hospital staff …

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Even knowing the worst is better than not knowing at all, and worrying about it.” 

“When you were in love you did all manner of foolish things.”

“You women often have the same blind spots about hats that you have about men.”

“There was very little to a kiss these days. It didn’t mean anything.”

REVIEW:
This fairly simple book gives us the slow story of nurse Alison Lynwood, who at book’s outset is mad about Dr. Johnny Crowther, but “Johnny’s the type who can make you feel you’re the one girl in the world for him one minute and let you down the next,” says Alison friend’s Norah. “The trouble is with Johnny, he doesn’t want to settle down, doesn’t want to tie himself down to one woman.” On her side, Alison is in love with Johnny, and so spends a lot of time sighing by the silent phone—until Dr. Steven Hartley moves to town. Suddenly she has someone to dance with at the hospital ball while Johnny is whirling another gal around the floor. Alison gets the bright idea of dating Steven so as to make Johnny jealous, but the catch is that she really likes Steven. “How nice he is, she thought, not for the first time. He was such a restful person to be with. He was a much nicer person than Johnny. The thought brought her up with a jerk, but she realized it was true.” 

Over the ensuing pages, the volume turns down on Johnny—who, miffed, calls Alison even less than usual—and up on Steven, until “she was no longer in love with Johnny. As a man he could not hold a candle to Steven.” The rub here is that Alison’s cousin Elvira turns up, chasing Johnny actually, as she’d met him at Alison’s home one time and become instantly smitten. She’s enrolled in the nursing school and starts taking up Johnny’s spare time, but when she notices that Alison’s eyes have turned to Steven, suddenly she wants that man, too. Knowing 19-year-old Elvira as we do, though, it seems hard to believe she’s going to tempt a solid type like Steven. “Elvira was so ruthless,” Alison thinks. “She could lie, cheat, scheme or even steal to get her own way. That she had good looks and a superficial charm and could to thse things without the slightest compunction made her a most formidable enemy.” But she is very transparent, tossing herself in Steven’s path or passenger seat with flirtatious lies that even a cad like Johnny could see through and tire of.

Eventually Steven kisses Alison, but with all the gossip going around the hospital—Alison is not the type to dump poor Johnny as a friend, and still has dinner with him on occasion though it’s clear to him that she has cooled—and with the usual misunderstandings and jealousies, the usual inability to just say how you feel, it takes numerous chapters to sort things out. In the interim, there’s a suicidal patient to talk in off the roof, among other adventures, but after this one, Steven tells her, “I couldn’t—wouldn’t have done it without you, Alison. I kept remembering things you had said in our conversations when we had been out together.” There are Alison’s attempts to befriend and understand Elvira, which result in that young woman climbing out on the roof, too, and Alison takes the lead there, saying, “Don’t you know that you can’t force love? The only way you can win anyone’s affection is by being loving. You could be an absolutely wonderful person, the kind of girl no one could help loving. Do you realize that?” Somehow this does the trick, and Elvira decides she really does love nursing and regrets all her bad-girl antics and wants to be Alison’s friend. Their lifelong rivalry, which has been made much of throughout the book, which has been totally unexplained—poof!—is gone. Alison is tucking Elvira into the spare bedroom in her apartment when Johnny drops by to see how Elvira is, and says he’ll take her out next week. “Do you know what I’ve discovered about Johnny? He loves women most when they’re in need of him,” Alison says slyly, though it does not ring true with us readers. Steven turns up a few minutes later to have his turn with Elvira, brushing her tears away and giving her a hug and a sleeping pill. Elvira can’t understand why everyone is so nice, but Alison lies blatantly: “We’re all being nice to you because we love you,” and not a word is said about this abrupt switch in story line, either. As Alison is seeing Steven out the door, she’s finally able, in the slightest way possible, to suggest her feelings for him when she whispers, “Steven, don’t go—” and this is all it takes to break down the misunderstandings.

I am a complete sucker for the young woman hanging out with her friends in her apartment—somehow a scene in which everyone is sitting around the living room with cocktails in their hands laughing at a joke just slays me. This book has these scenes by the handful, and its relaxed, simple tempo is soothing. Maybe the book is a smidge too simple, and the wrap-up of the conflict between Elvira and Alison is way too forced (a copy-cat would-be suicide? We love you?? Really???), but Alison is a smart, outspoken character we can admire, and on the whole this sweet book is pleasantly enjoyable.

A Nurse for Dr. Sterling

By Ruth MacLeod, ©1962

Young and idealistic Janet Raleigh, fresh out of an exclusive school, found herself bored by the shallow pleasures of high society. Seeking something to fill her life and give it meaning, she chose nursing as her career. To her amazement she found that her wealth and background created an unexpected barrier. The doctor she loved doubted her sincerity and patronized her; her supervisor questioned her conduct and humiliated her; and then came the brutal attack that put her very life in danger.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“I hurt so! Kiss me and make it well!”

“Please, nurse … I’m going to die! Give me just one kiss to take with me—”

“Janet, you don’t want to be a nurse! You’ll have to do awful things! As a nurse you’d have to make hundreds of beds, and bathe all sorts of dirty people, empty bedpans and emesis basis, and listen to people whine about their aches and pains!”

REVIEW:
Imagine my horror when, arriving at the house we’d rented for a long weekend of walking in the apple orchard and reading on the couch, I discovered I had left my nurse novels at home! What to do, what to do? Well, thankfully this is the era of the e-book, and I was actually able to find a handful of actual nurse e-novels out there, including—imagine my surprise!—The Nurse Novel Megapack of four novels, including three I hadn’t read yet (actually, I knocked off two of them over the weekend, so now I’ve just one left). Coming soon, a blog page listing other nurse e-books, should you happen to find yourself in a similar horrifying predicament, dear reader!

Anyway, A Nurse for Dr. Sterling is a curious choice for a curated selection of nurse novels, because it in my opinion crosses over the line of true VNRN just a smidge. The problem here is that most of the  book is told from the point of view of Dr. David Sterling; nurse Janet Raleigh anchors only about a third of it, despite what the back-cover blurb suggests (and in this case, the blurb errs on a number of points, so beware!). When we meet him, Dr. Sterling is fleeing a malpractice suit he’d lost—he had not diagnosed a terminal brain cancer in a man who had demonstrated few vague symptoms, so though it wasn’t really his fault, most of his patients had left him and he’d fled town and the blot on his reputation to come to Las Lomas, California, an actual town on Monterey Bay.

He’s been hired by his old acquaintance Dr. Graham Burns, who had dumped his excellent, dependable, strong, smart wife Mildred, who had supported him during his up-and-coming years, for a young vixen half his age. Mildred’s gone on without him and is now superintendent of nurses, while Coralee is making passes at David from about the first minute they meet. David is determined not to wreck the marriage of his old friend and his second chance, but Coralee is a very determined young lady!

What’s interesting about her as a character, however, is that she has an awful voice, and we are reminded of this repeatedly, “a tone that had neither resonance nor depth. If he had heard her first on the telephone, David thought, he’d have pictured her as a dull, drab, dishwater blonde, probably chewing gum.” Mildred, on the other hand, “wasn’t a beautiful woman, but her personality made looks unimportant,” while Coralee seems to be the opposite. “I think she’s beautiful,” David admits of Coralee, “and would be even more so if her voice matched. As a person, however, I wouldn’t stack her up against Mildred at all.” It’s an unusual take in a VNRN, that personality outweighs looks; where will this come out in the end?

Meanwhile, back at the ranch, we learn about Janet Raleigh, a nursing student who has left her privileged background because “I want to do something important, she thought; not just to keep occupied, but to make my life count for something.” Under the withering eye of Nurse Daisy Andrews, a 40-year-old spinster battle axe who does not deserve her name (or the nickname Dizzy, which the girls have given her, tee hee!), however, Janet is losing her resolve, as Nurse Andrews bawls Janet out in front of the doctors on numerous occasions (but winning her the sympathy and interest of one Dr. David Sterling, so it isn’t all bad!). One day poor Janet is given the difficult task of bathing the most difficult patient on the ward, 19-year-old Archie Crane, who is not recovering from his burst appendix eight weeks ago. He refuses to cooperate with the sponge bath until Janet kisses him, which she does only after he has wrapped himself around her and refused to let go.

The bastard tells another nurse of his exploits, and Janet is bawled out yet again by Nurse Andrews. She’s ready to quit, until wise Mildred asks Janet to write down all the reasons she wanted to become a nurse and why now she wants to quit—and when one page is full of scribbling and the other has only Nurse Andrews’ name on it, Janet is ready to get with the program. Mildred sends her on her way with some kindly advice: As a student nurse, even if her superior is unfair, “in respect for her professional knowledge and standing, you follow her orders meticulously, listen carefully to all she says, refraining from comment or retort if you don’t agree. You accept her criticism gracefully, knowing it’s for your own benefit eventually.” Initially I was a little bothered that the bully was going to triumph, but I should have trusted Mildred—two weeks later, she demotes Nurse Andrews from head nurse to assist in the OR. (Of course, we astute VNRN readers see the writing on the wall with this move!)

On the lam from Coralee, David asks Janet to go out with him, and she agrees. “Janet was an easy girl to be with, David reflected. She didn’t make demands, and was at ease in any social situation. It’s her poise that makes her so darned attractive, he thought, watching her.” Soon the pair are seeing each other almost every night, but that doesn’t stop Coralee, who literally chases David around the golf course when every shot she hits lands 10 feet from David’s ball. The woman could have out-whacked Louise Suggs (a neglected golf giant who beat Sam Snead on a par-three course in 1961, correctly arguing that what they lacked in driving distance, women could make up in the short game). When he turns down her forty-ninth pass in the sand trap of the 14^th hole, Coralee almost slugs David in the head with her niblick, but Graham saves her from becoming a murderess by dropping with what appears to be a heart attack. Dr. David Sterling knows better, however, and diagnoses a cardiac tumor, and never mind how ridiculously rare those are, because he’s already correctly diagnosed masher Archie Crane with a liver abscess. 

In the interim, David cannot commit to Janet, so she foolishly accepts a date with Archie, and her date with Archie goes horribly awry when he proves that his behavior in the hospital was, far from an aberration, just the tip of the iceberg when he drives her to Rocky Dell Park and assaults her, eventually pushing her off a cliff after he’d thrown her to the ground and she’d bashed him on the head with a rock. Knocked unconscious, she comes to only to find he’s fled the scene, leaving her to flag down a passing car to get home. She’s two hours late for curfew at the nurse’s dorm, and there’s Nurse Andrews, all full of slut-shaming. To the high credit of all her friends, everyone who hears the story wants Janet to call the police, but she resists—and then it turns out she’s suffering a subdural hematoma and needs immediate brain surgery! The surgeons, of whom David of course is one, are scrubbed and boring holes in Janet’s skull when Graham drops of another attack, and David steps up and completes the surgery. Does he get any thanks? Well, Janet’s grateful, but Nurse Andrews is livid because David is not a brain surgeon! In revenge, she’s ready to testify on behalf of Archie Crane in the assault trial, pulling out what she calls David’s affair with Coralee—what this has to do with the assault is beyond me—as it’s her opinion that Janet asked to be attacked at the park after her scandalous behavoir, being attacked at the hospital. But she’ll withhold her testimony if Janet agrees to resign—that’s one hell of a grudge!

But before Andrews has the chance to crush the pair like little bugs, Graham finally agrees to exploratory cardiac surgery if David will do it, as it seems he can do anything except the dishes. Andrews is assisting in the surgery, and—you guessed it—hands David the wrong drug when Graham’s blood pressure tanks. David manages to pull Graham away from the Grim Reaper with open-heart massage, and Andrews flies out of the OR and commits suicide in the scrub room, injecting her own heart with the same incorrect drug she’d handed David, one of the more spectacular VNRN flame-outs I’ve ever witnessed. So everyone’s reputation is saved, and now it’s just for David to come to his senses and propose to Janet. Also for Graham to come out of surgery to find that Coralee has left him and that Mildred, bless her, will take the louse back. So happy endings for all.

This book has strong women characters in Mildred and Janet, women whose character is more important than their looks; Coralee, who wins big in the latter department, is the loser in the end. I did appreciate her dramatic presence, though, as I did Nurse Andrews. I also found some wisdom in the book, in the advise that Mildred gives Janet about accepting criticism, and also in passages in which it’s suggested that Archie is faking his illness: “I believe it’s a mistake,” David says, “to ascribe illness to neurosis before every physical source is thoroughly checked,” which is a maxim still very true today and of which I’ve needed to remind myself on occasion. But while it has a lot to recommend it, I just didn’t love this book—my beef with it being that it’s mostly about David Sterling, and the writing, though it had some interesting ideas, just didn’t sparkle enough to make an A-grade book. It’s worth a read, though, so if you have the chance to spend the afternoon with David Sterling’s nurse, take it.