Camp Nurse

By Kathleen Harris
(pseud. Adelaide Humphries Rowe), ©1961

Offered the position as a nurse at a boys’ camp, in the Catskills, young and beautiful Tanis Thaler accepted reality. However, she was told to look less attractive so that none of the older boys would fall in love with her. Tanis finds a real challenge in being a camp nurse. There are fifty boys to look after and two in particular present real problems to her as a nurse. But as a lovely young woman, she has an even greater problem. Because she must dress and act like a dowdy spinster, the handsome athletic director, Jim Nielson, whom she has grown to love with all her heart, treats her like a sister … 

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Mrs. Carson’s in number three, all ready for you, Doctor—and she can’t leave until I give her back her shoes and girdle.” 

“What age is an unimpressionable one?”

“She ought to be able to walk back alone. It was not yet dark; and it wasn’t far. But there might be snakes.”

“There was no sense in a girl hiding her legs, especially when they were nice legs.”

REVIEW
“How would you like to take a leave of absence from the office and spend the summer in the Catskills?” said no doctor, ever, to the most dependable staff nurse in their busy surgical practice. So right out of the gate we know we are in for an unbelievable story. Tanis Thaler, recovering from an open appendectomy weeks ago, is apparently not yet fit to go back to work, so her boss decides that sending her to work at a boys’ camp for the summer would be an awesome way for her to get her strength back, because 50 boys would be so easy to wrangle! There’s just one problem: Tanis is just so gosh-darned beautiful that it would be a huge distraction to the impressionable young men. “Try to make yourself look a bit more—severe,” Dr. Wedner tells her, so she shops for dark, heavy glasses, oversized uniforms that “would not accentuate any curves and were too long to show off to advantage of a nicely turned calf. Tanis thought she would look positively dowdy.” 

And what success she has! When on the train she meets Jim Neilson, a stunningly handsome man, he looks her over lustily not at all, instead feeling sorry for the “timid soul, the born-to-remain-unwed type,” whom “no man could possibly be attracted to.” And so he condescends to be “exasperatingly polite” to Tanis for most of the book. In his thoughts, however, he is downright rude, wondering “what the heck was wrong with this girl’s legs that she wore her dresses so long,” and “what was the big idea, anyway—going around looking like a frump,” as if her attire is an affront to his personal dignity.

Fortunately for Tanis’ future marriage prospects, she also has Perry Davis, another camp counselor, who “liked to brag about his conquests with women”; faced with the prospect of a summer in a camp with only one unmarried woman, Perry is determined to make the best of a bad lot. “When marooned on a desert island a guy had to take what was at hand,” because “it couldn’t be that he was interested in a girl who looked as she did, although he had paid her the compliment of saying that she had a fine mind” after their discussion about Krushchev’s speech at the UN summit meeting. Of course, Tanis thinks, “no girl in her right mind wanted to be complimented merely on that score,” but Perry soon realizes she’s a knockout after he’s forcibly kissed her and knocked off her glasses in the process. “Next time I kiss you, it won’t be just because you’re a girl,” the flatterer declares and proposes, because though he has never been interested in getting married, “if he ever did decide to settle down, however, it might be good to settle for a nurse—they earned a good salary.” He then advises Tanis he won’t give her secret away. “Why, if Jim, for instance, knew what a dreamboat you are, he’d try to impress you with all that brawn of his!”

You can’t have 50 boys in a book without some of them being bad seeds, and if the book is set 60 years ago, the toughs are going to have adorably silly names like Stinker. “Scrapper” Donahue is a bully who goes around beating up the little kids and taking their lunch money, causing Tanis to go full-bore guilt trip on the unsuspecting kid. When she catches him pounding little Timmy Parkinson to make him say “uncle,” she scolds him that he should find something better to do with his time. “If you mean a four-eyed dame like you, I’ve got no time to waste on chicks,” retorts Scrapper, instantly winning my affection. Tanis lets this go by and instead delivers some sappy lines like how everyone would admire and look up to him if he weren’t such an asshole. “I’m sure that Timmy—and lots of the others—would, if you’d only let them,” she tells him, and Timmy, true champion that he is, manages not to throw up on her shoes.

Another young camper, Stewart, comes from a “broken home,” and is “over-sensitive—and exceptionally brilliant, moody, unresponsive,” and 17 years old, the perfect target for Tanis. “She had been wondering how to ‘reach’ him—get him to confide in her,” though what she wants to know about is not clear. Ironically, after all the emphasis on Tanis’s looks, when Stewart comes down with mumps (one of two vaccine-preventable illnesses the camp is overrun with this summer), she tells him, “It’s you I like, Stewart—not the way you look.” Stewart, at least, is the only guy in the camp who falls for Tanis exactly as she appears. “It did not matter that Tanis was not pretty by accepted standards. What did matter was that he could talk to her and she listened and understood; that she believed in him. He would never ask for anything more. All he wanted was for this—and Tanis—never to change.” Honestly, Tanis should be chasing Stewart, the only good man in the book.

Tanis attempts to get Jim to let Timmy out of sports essentially because he’s a wimp, but after finding out that Timmy is not “a bit mixed-up”—could this be a euphemism?—Jim won’t hear of it, telling her that if the other boys duck him in the pond, it’s all in fun. “In order to become a man, a boy has to learn to take it,” he says. It’s an alarming point of view, but he does note that you can’t win if you don’t play, and that “a man doesn’t have to excel at any sport, but he does have to learn to stand on his own two feet.” This is actually a valid point of view, coping skills being essential to surviving life, but Tanis fights it in her own weird way, getting Timmy out of sports by tucking him into a cot in the infirmary, and then leaving him there alone all night, possibly because a boy has to learn to take it? After Jim refuses to baby Timmy, Tanis decides Jim is “stubborn, opinionated, and egotistical. No longer could he seem too attractive to her”—because for one brief moment, a character’s physical appearance is not the major factor in whether a person is beautiful to another. Don’t worry, it won’t last. 

Perry eventually sort of proposes to Tanis, telling her to “name the day,” which she does not do—so therefore in her mind they are not engaged, while in Perry’s they are. She acknowledges to herself that she is essentially playing a rotten game with Perry because she’s tired of not having anyone chase her for the summer. “She had only encouraged him because her feminine pride had demanded some masculine recognition—and yes, to be honest, because she had been hurt when Jim had not given her any,” the second part of her nefarious plan being to “jolt” Jim into paying attention to her. “If he didn’t—well, what difference would it make if she were engaged to Perry—or even if, eventually, she decided to marry him?” Seems to me it might make an incredibly enormous difference, and not to mention it’s a really sick game to play.

Tanis also gradually starts shedding her “disguise,” wearing shorts and dumping the glasses, and it works! Jim, appreciating her new look, thinks, “She seemed to be an entirely different person. Not the strait-laced, mousey type of girl he had imagined, but a girl any man would notice.” So Tanis dumps Perry, who immediately picks up on the real reason she had been seeing him: “You wanted to make Jim jealous. Like all the girls, you go for all that brawn and muscle. I suppose you’d marry a guy like him in a second if he asked you.” Because it’s not the person he is—which is not in any way attractive—that’s important, it’s how he looks. And guess what? When, on the last night of camp, she dresses up in pumps and a dress that doesn’t hide her knees for the big send-off dinner, Jim grabs her arm and pulls her off to dinner at an outside restaurant without even asking her, and tells her, “I wouldn’t let you marry Perry if I had to marry you myself”—high motivation indeed—well, that’s all it takes for Tanis!

This is the book’s enormous contradiction. Author Adelaide Humphries (here writing as Kathleen Harris), as often as she has Tanis mouthing words about how it’s who you are that matters, not how you look, the book’s plot clearly demonstrates she doesn’t actually believe that to be true. Jim has not been in any way kind to Tanis all summer, so her realization in the last pages of the book that she is in love with Jim seems to prove Perry entirely correct: Jim’s only redeeming features are his good looks and his killer body. As for Jim, the first time Jim pays anything other than stiffly polite attention to her is when she’s wearing nylons, so his interest in her is equally shallow. The only person in the book with a genuinely honorable character is 17-year-old Stewart, so the moral of the story seems to be that it’s up to the younger generation to save the world. Good luck, Stewart, you’ve got a big job on your hands!

A Nurse’s Strange Romance

By Arlene Hale, ©1964

Meredith Michaels, R.N., had three loves in her life: nursing, and two young doctors. Dark-haired, intense Ryan Quinn she had loved since they first began training together. Steve Baxter, big, blond, full of the joy of life, had been the perfect balance for the inseparable threesome. Now they had the chance to open private practice together with Meredith as office nurse—and life seemed complete. Meredith, in fact, was engaged to Ryan. But something happened. Ryan became steeped in gloom, and even Steve’s former gaiety seemed forced. Meredith was distraught. But then, in the middle of the crisis, and with the wisdom she never dreamed she possessed, she grasped on a solution that had been staring her in the face.

GRADE: C- 

BEST QUOTES:
“The hospital frowns upon interns and nurses smooching in the hallways.”

“That blush makes you different from any nurse on the floor. You are the only one that seems to respect some old-fashioned chastity!”

“Long may she walk with her cute little wiggle!”

“What a tasty looking neck!” 

“Maybe it’s not as exciting to diagnose old Mrs. Cleaver’s arthritis as it is to make smears for some important test in a research lab but it is important! At least to Mrs. Cleaver.”

REVIEW:
The author of this very stupid book, Arlene Hale, is something of a thorn in my side. She was ridiculously prolific—I’ve reviewed 27 of her VNRNs so far and she has written at least a dozen more—but her average grade over those 27 books is a pathetic C+. Here we have yet another snoozer—well, it might be a snoozer if the leading man weren’t such an ass, but as it was it just made me mad. Meet Ryan Quinn, a “deep, dark, secretive” driven type who, though the author tries incredibly hard to depict him as a misunderstood soul, is borderline psychotic. As we open the book, Ryan and his best friend Steve Baxter are four months from completing their residencies, at which point they will go into practice and start earning an actual salary. But “payment is being demanded,” Ryan tells Meredith. “I will have to quit and go out and find a job, pay them off.” I am not even going to start on how absurd this situation is, but it’s definitely indicative of how the rest of the book is going to go.

To wit: Nurse Meredith Michaels, who has been dating Ryan Quinn for years now and is all but holding her breath until he drops on one knee and opens the tiny velvet box, has magically inherited a tidy sum from a deceased aunt. Her first inclination is to quit her nursing job and go back to school to become a teacher. Is this her long-denied dream finally coming true? No! Meredith loves nursing! But Steve and Ryan have bizarrely been badgering her to trade her nurse’s cap for blackboard chalk. “You are a pure descendent of Florence Nightingale, no doubt. But they need teachers too. Desperately,” Steve tells her, because nurses are just a dime a dozen! (And the financing of her nurse’s degree remains a secret.)

Ryan’s misfortune turns out to be Meredith’s salvation, as now she can give her money to Ryan and remain in the career she loves best! Ryan, the selfless wonder, hesitates less than ten seconds before accepting. Then he has the balls to tell her that he is “too honorable to make plans to be married until every penny had been paid on his debts,” and furthermore he is accepting a research position that pays very little, so it’s likely to be years before that happens. Of course, if he married Meredith, his debt would be expunged, but that point is overlooked by everyone, even Meredith.

Alas, this is not the end of Ryan Quinn’s perfidy. He leaves for a new job far from Meredith and does not ask her to come work at his new hospital with him, so she remains at City Hospital with Steve, who takes every opportunity to kiss her and make wildly inappropriate remarks to his best friend’s girlfriend. For Ryan’s part, immediately upon arriving at his new hospital, he instantly falls in love with Dr. Carol Simmons and dates her for months, taking her out to restaurants he cannot afford (when he had been too poor to go anywhere with Meredith except to her house, where he had eaten dinners she had cooked for him, and presumably paid for as well). Naturally Ryan does not bother to tell either woman about the other, and it’s nearly Christmas before he fesses up to Carol. He has the nerve to be flabbergasted when she is jealous, but placates her by promising to spend Christmas with her, even though he has already promised the day to Meredith. Then the swell guy is unable to tell Meredith that he won’t be coming home after all—much less that he doesn’t love her and is seeing someone else—until the day before Christmas, when he calls her and lies to her about a patient who he claims needs his attention through the holidays.

As it turns out there is such a patient, Betty Walters, a lonely, pathetic waif with leukemia, and now Ryan drags this poor woman into his miserable clutches as well. He starts to pay “special attention” to her: “At odd moments, he would drop in to see her and say a few words to her, tease her gently and lay the foundation for a relationship that went beyond the normal one of patient and doctor.” Betty, who has only months to live, falls in love with Ryan, and her bullying, equally psychotic brother Bruce blackmails Ryan into marrying Betty: If he refuses, Bruce is going to assault Carol, and if Ryan goes to the police about it, Bruce will have one of his friends do it. Paralyzed with fear, Ryan lets the situation ride for weeks. Eventually Carol hears hospital gossip that Ryan is spending too much time with Betty.  When she confronts him, he insults her: “You’re being female. Jealous! It doesn’t become you.” Just wow. At least Carol has the sense to break up with Ryan—Meredith is still home waiting by the phone.

Steve, clearly pining for Meredith, decides to open a clinic and invites Ryan and Meredith to join him. Bizarrely, Ryan agrees—and when he moves back home, he kisses dopey Meredith, and she’s thinking, “He hadn’t said he loved her. He hadn’t asked her to marry him either. But it was all there in undertones and she could wait. She had already waited this long.” And she is going to wait a lot longer. Because he’s sneaking back to see Carol to tell her what he never told Meredith, that he loves her. Then he heads over to see Betty, kisses her, too, and asks her to wait a little longer to be married to him, thinking, “He did not really want Betty to die and yet her death would mean his own freedom.” I can’t believe author Arlene Hale thinks this guy is a reasonable love interest. 

Ryan flees back to his hotel room, but Bruce follows him and beats him to a pulp. This finally convinces him that Bruce really means business, so Ryan—this guy just never stops—calls Meredith, tells her he’s been in a car accident and asks her to wire him $500, which he then uses to pay for the wedding, which goes off the next day. The cake is not even crumbs before he has fled back home, where he goes straight to Meredith’s apartment and tells her he loves her and wants to marry her! When she says, “I am not sure I believe you anymore, Ryan,” for the first time showing some actual sense, he says “Darling, you must! You have always trusted me, always believed in me. Don’t stop now. Don’t you know I need you, that I’ve always needed you? Don’t doubt me now. I couldn’t endure it! We’ll be married whenever you say.” To which she replies, “Darling, let’s be married on my birthday. Next week!” And now he is back to hoping that Betty dies in the next few days so he won’t become a bigamist. So to atone for the huge mess he’s in, he goes straight to Carol’s house where he kisses her—and then tells her he is being married to Meredith.

Meredith breaks the news to Steve the next day, and now Steve is going to pieces. “His idea was to take the bull by the tail and spin him until he crashed into the wall and broke it down, or a woman by the hair and—” and now he is racing to Meredith’s apartment, bursts in, grabs her and kisses her though she beats at him and protests, “but he would not let her go,” instead telling her that he loves her, too. Guess what—she suddenly realizes that it’s Steve she is in love with.

Honestly, I just can’t go on. Let me just say that Meredith Michaels is a pathetic sap, Ryan Quinn is a self-absorbed psychotic, and Steve is a self-absorbed, domineering bully. Don’t waste your time with this trio. You might take them as an object lesson not to waste your time on any more Arlene Hale books, either, and I wouldn’t fault you in the slightest.

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.

Nurse Atholl Returns

By Jane Arbor, ©1952 

When Lyn Atholl’s fiancé abruptly broke their engagement only a month before the day fixed for their wedding, she felt that the shock had disrupted her whole life. She could not bear the thought of resuming her dearly loved profession of nursing—still less going back to Broadfields Hospital, which she had so recently left in happy expectancy among the good wishes of all her friends. A chance meeting with the famous surgeon, Mr. Warner Belmont, convinced her that she was wrong, and she decided to return to Broadfields. But—would she be able to go through with it?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Lyn thought wryly that to dance with a battleship could not give a girl more confidence than to dance with Tom in a crowd, where it was always the other couples who got out of his way.” 

REVIEW:
Lyn Atholl is leaving her beloved job to get married to a man she hasn’t seen in over a year. And that works out about as well as you expect it will. Turns out her beloved, Capt. Perry Garston, found himself a wife when he was stationed in Austria—and told her as much about Lyn as he told Lyn about Gerda, so you see what a narrow escape Lyn has had. She’s horribly embarrassed about her turn of fortune—much more than anyone in the current age would be, so it’s a little difficult to follow why she’s ready to chuck nursing altogether, not only the hospital she has just left—but soon imperious surgeon Dr. Warner Belmont is wagging a finger in her face, asking her, “Do you mean that your efficiency in your work depends solely upon the smooth running of your personal affairs? Isn’t that taking the importance of the individual and of self-pity too far?” 

Ultimately she decides that he’s right and goes back to Broadfields, but soon she’s “wondering about him as a man—the books he read, the games he played, the people he liked,” but of course that last question is easy: He doesn’t like anyone. Well, except Eve Adler, a petulant, beautiful, very talented singer whom he squires about town. We are frequently reminded that “he needs neither advice nor help, nor companionship nor anything at all from any other human being,” and that “he gets on splendidly with other men and he’s a kind of hero to boys. Yet when it comes to women—to you nurses particularly—he treats you as if he had only to put a penny in the slot to make you tick over like machines. No wonder you resent it.” But Lyn, inexplicably, does not resent it at all, and soon decides “her feeling for the man at her side transcended anything she had ever known before. And she had thought that, after Perry, she would never love again!” Now we only have to wade through 130 more pages of misunderstandings, scenes of Werner being cold and snippy and Lyn being dignified and admirable. Ultimately there’s a train crash and a flu epidemic, and suddenly he’s declaring his undying love for her.

It's not a dull book, though not outstanding, and the plot device of having the heroine fall for an ass who remains one until the final three pages is particularly maddening. Some of the characters are fun to watch—the rotten women especially, it must be confessed—and Lyn is a quiet, competent type, even if she is ready at the drop of a ring to walk away from her profession, though she admits that “all she had learnt in nursing would be wasted” after she marries. Overall you might do worse than to see Nurse Atholl return—even if she’s just going away again at the end.

North Country Nurse

By Robert Ackworth, ©1965

Lovely young Mary Loring, her nurse’s training behind her, came home to the north country for two reasons—one, to help the people in this vast wilderness land; the other, locked in her heart, to work with young Dr. Ken Shannon who was coming back here to start his practice. But when Ken stepped off the plane, beside him was a beautiful, titian-haired bride. Now Mary wanted only to escape—from this man she could never have, from her beloved north country that would always remind her of him. It took a startling confession from Ken, and a danger-filled mercy flight with a devil-may-care pilot named Eddie Garrett, to show Mary that she didn’t have to run away—that a girl doesn’t always know the secrets of her own heart …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:|
“It’s odd that of all the moments a person passes in a lifetime, only a few are important, isn’t it? I wish now that I had decided I wanted to be something, instead of insisting that I must belong to someone.” 

REVIEW:
Nurse Mary Loring has returned to her home, a tiny town of 900 God-fearing souls in the “north country,” unspecified except that it’s not Idaho—Montana? Wyoming? Some state that is home to dude ranches and trappers and loggers—and few medical personnel. Mary is coming back with every intention of marrying Dr. Kenneth Shannon, who also grew up in this town. She’s been crushing on him for a decade, since she was 12 years old—they grow up fast in the mountains—when he left for medical school, and she’s seen him only a couple of times since then, so right off the bat we’re stuck with this extremely awkward and implausible albatross of a major plot device. And it’s not improved when the good doctor steps off the Cessna with—gasp!—his new bride!

Mary immediately decides she will leave town, never mind her vows to help her isolated fellow citizens, which would leave them without a nurse. But only a month after Kenneth arrives, “when people would not be likely to guess the real reason for her departure.” Does it really matter? Anita Shannon turns out to be as incredibly gorgeous as she is shy, completely unable to extend herself or make friends. Mary just hopes that “the absolutely unexpected might happen” while Anita is out taking long walks in the woods, or that “the strange woman who was Kenneth Shannon’s wife might walk out on him.” Nice! Kenneth does his best to get help for Anita—unfortunately asking his best female “friend,” Mary, to befriend Anita, “who was seen less and less as the days went by.”

Again and again, given an opportunity to be generous, mature, and kind, Mary instead puts on a deep freeze, doing little, and then only when absolutely forced, thinking that “her only hope for a future with Kenneth rested with the possibility that Anita Shannon would not make adjustments.” Anita even tries to unburden herself about her difficulties to Mary, but Mary just acts indignant at the “cold peculiar” woman and completely shuts her down, snapping, “Mrs. Shannon”—and her formality of using Anita’s married name is hostile all by itself—“I just won’t comment. What you do is entirely up to you.”

Later, when through her own hard work, Anita starts to open up and make friends with other villagers, “Mary could not help staring at Kenneth Shannon’s beautiful wife. She had seemed almost warm. It was hard to believe.” Naturally, Mary’s enormous hypocrisy is completely lost on her—and possibly on the author as well, as he makes no hints about how horrible Mary has been, and Mary never experiences any regrets about her cruel behavior.

When she’s not giving poor Anita the cold shoulder, she’s running hot and cold with three men in town. She accepts dates with forest ranger Tom Fogarty, even though she thinks he’s boring and awkward, and though she knows her best friend has a crush on him—and she’s completely taken by surprise when the friend, who feels doomed to be a spinster in this tiny town of few single men, leaves town for manlier pastures. Mary also has hot and hunky Perry Wynn, who runs her aunt’s ranch very capably, hinting gently about his feelings for her, but Mary calls him strange too, and gets all cranky anticipating she’ll have to turn down another man she doesn’t want—but is “annoyed” when he doesn’t stand in the barn door to watch her leave. Last is pilot Eddie Garrett, a frightening, arrogant man whose behavior toward Mary crosses well into harassment, making me concerned he’s a potential rapist: Though she’s told him from the outset that she’s not interested in him, he will not take no for an answer, and instead leers, “I’m going to make you get to know me,” and “I’m going to find your breaking point someday—the kind of breaking point I mean.” He grabs her at a dance and refuses to let go as she tries to pull herself away, saying, “When we dance you have to let me hold you in my arms. If I tried it any other way you’d yell blood murder from a false sense of outrage.” But when he tells her he was orphaned and raised by uncaring relatives, suddenly Mary feels guilty about “how unjustly she had leaped to conclusions about him,” and apologizes to him when he kisses her. Ew.

The rest of the book has some pretty descriptions of the north country scenery, especially if you are fond of the forests of the western states, but the medicine is laughable (the doctor, who performs appendectomies, is unable to manage a punctured lung, which only requires a chest tube; Mary brings large quantities of tongue depressors to a forest fire first-aid station) and of course Mary herself is obsessive, self-centered, and vindictive, and her choice of men in the end is unfathomable—she is, in short, not a likeable character. The writing otherwise isn’t terrible, but it’s just too difficult to get around the problems of a stupid plot device combined with a stupid heroine. I love the north country, but I could not love this nurse.

Betsy Moran, R.N.

By Peggy Gaddis, ©1964

“Special duty with a millionaire…” Nurse Betsy Moran’s roommate moaned. “I’ll never know how you managed to turn the heads of the two most eligible bachelors on the staff, to say nothing of the town’s most exciting playboy.” Judy sighed deeply, “What have you got that I haven’t?” “Oh,” said Betsy, laughing at her friend. “Let’s just say it’s a gift.”

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“R.N.s can be so crude at times.”

“She had to arouse the boy and keep him aroused lest he slip away into a coma.”

“You’re a very lovely girl, and any man would be delighted to wear you on his arm.”

“I’m just sick that I lost my temper and shot you!”

“Us nurses look pretty special in our uniforms. Bet the gals he trots around with when he’s up and on his own two feet break their necks getting all dolled up to devastate him. And when we nurses come along, all starchy-white and soothing-looking, the man does a nose-dive!”

“Sure you don’t want to marry me? It might be fun. And any time you got fed up, all you’d have to do would be to say so and you could have a divorce.”

REVIEW:
Twenty-three-year-old Betsy Moran has a way with men. She scores a date with eligible Dr. Paul Elliott, and then one with widowed surgeon Dr. Stevenson—never mind that he’s twice her age! Dr. Stevenson asks her to special wealthy playboy Dr. Ken Hargroves, who has been shot in the back by one of his girlfriends, though he won’t say who it was—and when Betsy finds out, she, too, agrees to shirk professional ethics and the law, and refuses to name the culprit. She’s perfect for the nursing job, Dr. Stevenson decides, because “Ken Hargroves would go out of his mind without a pretty girl to look at. You just be somewhere Ken can look at you when he needs to.” She does her job well, and soon Ken is putty in her hands!

Outside of her dating life, Betsy’s down time is pretty well booked with lunches every Sunday with the aging Miss Emily Wingate, a wheelchair-bound, wealthy spinster near the end of her life, and Miss Emily’s nurse, usually called Maggie by Betsy, but who surprisingly turns out to be Betsy’s mother. The Miss Emily character, angelic but fading, is a Peggy Gaddis staple, and you will not be as shocked as Betsy was to learn that she’s to inherit $100,000 when Miss Emily dies. But her visits to Miss Emily are not so damaging to her social life, after all; she is nearly in a car wreck in Miss E’s driveway, and the young attorney driving the other car, Larry Donovan, insists that she go out with him. Which she does, once, even if the guy is a bit of an ass, becoming angry at Betsy when he runs into her when she’s out on a date with Dr. Paul—but she gets all frosty and refuses to say she won’t go out with Larry again when Paul asks her not to. Curiously, when Larry crashes a lunch at Miss Emily’s house to see Betsy—he tells her, “When I see something I want I go after it, with no holds barred,” forgetting that she might have something to say about it—the dowager asks Betsy not to see Larry, and she insists that she’s not at all interested in the cad, saying that he does not have “the kind of charm that would appeal to me. You don’t have to worry about him. I’ll even promise never to date him again, if it will ease your mind.”

Betsy even has a fair amount of nursing to do, between lying to the suicide victim and telling him he’s going to be fine when everyone knows he’s going to die in about ten minutes, and trying to get the unmarried forty-something career woman Doris Lathrop, hospitalized for atherosclerosis, to stop having temper tantrums, which seem to give her seizures and heart attacks. But not to worry, a man shows up out of the blue with a bouquet of flowers for Doris, so she enthusiastically agrees to give up her career, move to Florida, and marry a man she hasn’t seen in years, and didn’t look twice at when she did know him. Life’s problems solved!

Eventually one of Betsy’s many suitors proposes, on their third date, and then we have two pages of swooning and smooching. And that’s about all there is to this book. It’s not badly written, although on every other page Betsy’s eyes are widening, or she’s staring “round-eyed.” The patients’ story lines are hackneyed and certainly condescending to Doris Lathrop, who isn’t happy until she trades her career for a man. Peggy Gaddis has given us more treacly porridges to choke on in the past, and this isn’t quite as bad as some of her books, but really, that’s not much of reason to spend any time with Betsy Moran, R.N.

The Nurse from Hawaii

By Ethel Hamill
(pseud. Jean Francis Webb III), ©1964
Cover illustration by Edrien 

Gail Ingersoll, born and raised in Hawaii, had longed for months to return to the beauty and warmth of the Islands. But a sense of duty had kept her in Vermont, where she had gone to nurse old Miss Abigail Ingersoll, the last of the family on the Mainland. Now Miss Abigail was dead, and as soon as Gail had recuperated from a recent bout with pneumonia, she could begin making plans to go home. Vermont was covered with snow the day Dean Mathias and the small child in a red snowsuit came to seek shelter in the old carriage house—not even asking permission, if you please. Dean Mathias, with his sultry good looks, his pantherlike grace, could leave at any time, Gail decided, but it would break her heart if he took the small blonde Clancy away with him. There was some mystery about the pair, Gail was sure—something that had brought them from California to Vermont. Until that mystery was cleared up, and Clancy was quite safe—Dean was threatening to leave and take Clancy with him—Hawaii must wait. Only by giving up her dream could Gail realize her full potentialities as a nurse and find a love—or rather, two loves—that would make her renunciation an easy choice.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The expensive, ugly wallpaper showed lighter rectangles where other pictures had hung; past Ingersolls had bought themselves the best, but with no eye for beauty. And now, indestructible, their mistakes survived them.” 

REVIEW:
It was with great pleasure that I realized that Jean Francis Webb, one of my favorite VNRN authors, had written a nurse novel that I hadn’t read yet. This is the youngest of the six, written three years after the delightful Aloha Nurse, and it almost seems like it might have been the child of a second mother, as it has none of the camp or wit of its older sisters. But it is a smooth, gentle story that feels written, with a small (if not altogether obvious) mystery at the end, and worth reading, if for different reasons. 

Gail Ingersoll was born and raised in Hawaii, but for unclear reasons came to New York to work as a nurse. There she met Old Dr. Hawkstrom, who hails from the tiny town of Cutler, Vermont. She happened to have the same name as an elderly, wealthy woman desperately in need of a nurse, and as fate would have it, the two are second cousins twice removed, and this familial bond (though Gail had not been aware of the existence of old Abigail) compelled her to move to Cutler and nurse the old bat for four years, through what sounds like Alzheimer’s, until the woman had run out into the winter night and drowned herself in the pond. Gail has inherited the entire fairly large estate, and is casting about for something to do with it—she’s considering starting a hospital in town—when a tanned Californian surfer with “almost a dangerous face” is discovered in the carriage house with an ill five-year-old child named Clancy.

Gail immediately takes over the little girl, moving her into the house and falling unreasonably in love: “She hadn’t known a day ago that Clancy existed. Today, the tiny creature on the sofa bed seemed the most important person in the world.” She has Old Doc out to inject some penicillin, and the doctor seems strangely taken by the little girl, as well. It’s not too hard for us to see the writing on the wall: Dr. Hawkstrom’s daughter Beth had run away to California and hadn’t been heard of since. The little girl calls the man by his first name, but everyone assumes he is her father. He’s a cool, suave snake, and Gail warily puts up with him because she wants to keep Clancy—and of course the girl shouldn’t be moved for weeks after this little cold that she’s suffered.

Eventually Gail proposes to give Dean a stipend that would allow him to spend his life surfing in Hawaii if he will let her adopt Clancy. He comes back with a counter-proposal: That she come with him and Clancy to Hawaii, and, he tells her, “I’m perfectly willing to marry you first,” sealing the offer with a “hard and virile and questing” kiss. Another catch is that she can only have Clancy if she keeps her inheritance—but mercifully, she does not consider this for a moment.

Then Old Doc’s son, Dr. Jon Hawkstrom Jr., arrives in town, and Gail finds the air a bit thin and electric when he’s around. She’s sure he’s going to help her with her plan to convert the old mansion into a cottage hospital, but he insists he has some research projects he can’t abandon, and off he goes. Then Dean is on the brink of pulling out with Clancy, and stops to say goodbye to Gail—just as Doc Junior returns to town, and a lively conversation ensues in which all is revealed!

If the plot, in the retelling, seems a little dull, the story is assuredly not. The depiction of this snow-bound Vermont village evokes the Lucy Agnes Hancock books of the 1940s, calm and sweet; the tone is even, dare I say, a little Robert Frosted. Lovely sentences abound: “Spring seemed to be stirring in its sleep, under white blankets.” And: “I’d hate to see you crack your heart on the impossible.” Peripheral characters are well-drawn and charming, and there’s a compelling if tiny story of a woman who the town thinks has run off with the owner of the feed store. Gail is shown on several occasions to be a smart, competent, dedicated nurse with no idea of quitting her job, even when she’s a wealthy woman: “I’m a nurse and I always will be,” she insists. Completely devoid of the delicious camp of his past books, in this book Mr. Webb has instead created a lovely, simple story that, if of a different style than his earlier efforts, still demonstrates that he was a gifted writer. And one whose works I have now, sadly, exhausted.

Shop this title, reprinted under the title 
Green Mountain Nurse, offered by
Nurse Novels Publishing!

Special Duty

By Arlene Hale, ©1970 

When Dr. Taylor assigned her to special duty, lovely, auburn-haired Margo McKim felt a sense of pride—and also relief. Perhaps if she poured all her energy into her work, there would be no time left to brood over a love that was lost … but not forgotten. But the assignment only created new problems. Because the patient was famous folk singer Jedd Buckley, the case was kept secret. And his illness itself was shrouded in mystery. What had really caused Jedd’s breakdown? Why was his manager Steve so hostile towards Margo’s help? Why had the handsome, cool-headed Dr. Taylor insisted on her for assignment? Whatever mysterious motives lay behind this case, it was soon no secret that Jedd, Steve, and even Dr. Taylor all were looking at Margo not only as a nurse … but as a woman. She had thought that work would help her run away from love—was she actually running towards it?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“Being late is just a form of being dishonest, you know.” 

REVIEW:
Dr. Alex L. Taylor has just relocated to White Hill Hospital from Topeka, Kansas, and the man “has a way of walking by people as if they were sticks of furniture. Did you ever see him smile? … It was inconceivable that he knew any of them by either their first or last name. They were simply women in white. When he wanted one of them, he crooked a finger and expected her to follow obediently behind him, do what he ordered.” Naturally, every nurse in the place is hot for him. 

Except for Nurse Margo McKim. Sure, he’s handsome, but “that holier-than-thou attitude is for the birds,” she thinks. So she’s the one he calls up, arrogantly insisting she meet him at the Oasis Club, to discuss a private duty job he wants to hire her for. He’s got a top-secret patient whose “nerves are shot,” or so the official diagnosis goes. “You have a good figure. You’re also a pretty woman,” he says to Margo. “Just exactly the kind of nurse I’m looking for.” He even asks her if her auburn hair is real, if you can believe it, which of course is what makes for a good RN.

She agrees to take the job, which is to nurse rising folk singer Jedd Buckley out of his stupor. Manager Steve Ryan is extremely concerned about Jedd’s mental health: “You’ve got to have him on his feet in time for Dick’s Discotheque opening,” he insists. “Big deal. Big money. Big publicity. You’ve got to have him ready for it. He sure isn’t ready to crack up! I can just hear what talk that would cause—he might even lose some juicy contracts.” How sweet!

Almost immediately after arriving at Jedd’s mansion, she regrets taking the job when Steve snaps at her, “What I say, goes. And whether you agree or not, I know what I’m doing, and I know what’s best.” But her reward, outside of a big paycheck, is that Dr. Alex is going to see her every day, and he ends his first visit with a kiss. “I’m not just a cold fish after all. There’s hot blood in my veins,” he tells her. So hot that he starts their first real date by assaulting her in the car. She slaps him, and “he reached for her again and he kissed her until she struggled free.” She jumps out of the car and starts walking back to the house, but Alex says he’s really sorry, so she gets back in the car, they have a lovely picnic, and she kisses him back for real when he drops her off at the end of the day. I really don’t understand why it’s so common in VNRNs for women to end up dating, often happily, a man who’s assaulted her.

Back at the mansion, Margo slowly warms up Jedd, whose recovery is aided by numerous pills, because “tranquilizers will help him get a grip on himself.” Eventually he opens up enough to take her on a walk in the woods to meet Zeke, who is the father of a woman he’d been in love with back home, but whom he’d left behind to be a star. Of course, it’s obvious that Sallie Mae is the reason why Jedd has gone into this funk, but it takes everyone else 75 pages and a crisis in which Jedd grabs a rifle and holes himself up in a cave to figure this out.

At this point in the book, everyone, including Jedd’s oldest friend Charlie, who has stood by him through it all, is revealed to have had a fiscally related motive for pushing Jedd to succeed as a performer. Even Margo falls into the pattern of treating Jedd like a show pony who just needs to be whipped a little harder when she tells Alex, “Jedd shouldn’t be allowed to throw in the towel on his career. He has far too much to offer!” Curious that in all this book, no one once asks Jedd what he wants, even in the explosive crisis.

Thank goodness, though, for Nurse Margo, who runs up to the cave with Jedd’s bullets whizzing past her ears to tell him that she’s directed Steve to fly to Tennessee and pick up Sallie Mae on a chartered jet, so hadn’t he better get back home and shave? Everything is quite predictable after this point, though to be honest, it was predictable from the first mention of Sallie Mae’s name. For Margo’s love life, there is a limp red herring in the form of Steve, who has a turn at assaulting Margo and then asking her to be his girl. She mulls it over for about three seconds, and spends twice as long considering Greg Walters, the first man she ever loved, who broke her heart and rendered her an iron maiden, and who makes no actual appearance in the book. But in the end she’s cured of her frigidity as easily as Jedd is cured of his dystonia and homicidal ideations. All you need is the right person in your life!

It’s more than a little disconcerting that not one person in the book puts Jedd’s well-being above his potential as a star; we never hear a single word from Sallie Mae, so we have only the fact that she’s from the sticks and knew Jedd before he was successful to vouch for her character. But Charlie had those same credentials, and look how he turned out! As Jedd pulls himself together and wows them at Dick’s, all the leading players in his crackup express remorse at how selfish they’ve been, but it rings false to hear their regrets only after their own admittedly juicy slice of the pie has been reassured.

The treatment of Jedd in this book as a commodity to be jollied into giving up what everyone wants is not far removed from how the men treat Margo, so that’s a disturbing narrative twin in this book—again, not something that’s ever discussed. The story and the writing are ordinary and serviceable, neither being especially interesting, and the characters are no better. Arlene Hale is not my favorite writer, having garnered a less-than-C+ average in 21 reviews, and unfortunately for me, she was as prolific as she was ordinary. So if it is my duty to read her books, they are seldom special, and Special Duty is true to form.

The Strange Quest of Nurse Anne

By Mary Burchell
(pseud. Ida Cook), ©1964
Cover illustration by Paul Anna Soik 

To Anne Weston, brought up in an orphanage, the sudden discovery of her American cousins was as astounding as it was wonderful, and when they invited her to stay with them in their Maryland home her cup of happiness was full. But as her visit went on, Anne found herself becoming filled with suspicion—and unease…

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Rumor flourishes more luxuriantly in hospital ground than in any other known soil.”

“Surgeons are the biggest menace in creation to susceptible girls.”

“Only dull dogs are universally loved.”

“It has changed a good deal, New York, in the years I’ve known it, and certainly not always for the better. But there’s something about it, there’s something about it. There’s champagne in the air and adventure just around the corner.”

“If anything is obscure or dreary it’s sure of excellent reviews.”

“There’s no great virtue in refraining from doing something that’s no temptation.”

REVIEW:
What could have been a truly superlative book is slightly dampened by the old trope of a VNRN heroine who is dumber than a beetle, as my grandmother would have said. Time and time again, faced with the obvious, Anne Weston, who had the brains to get through nursing school and emerge a very talented nurse, is unable to recognize it. The interesting thing here is that her character in some ways makes this stupidity feasible: Raised in an orphanage without any knowledge about her parents, Anne has had no support or family to fall back on, and has made her own way in the world, which was essentially to take a path straight from the orphanage to the hospital nursing school, where she has lived for the past three years—from one sheltered environment to another, with little exposure to the world. The unfortunate part is that author Mary Burchell has not been able to prevent us from feeling anything other than contempt for Anne’s stupidity. Though her talent as a writer is clearly evident, I wish Ms. Burchell had tried a little harder to sell us on Anne’s blind spots and make us believe her decisions a little better.

As the book opens, Anne is about to bid farewell forever to the hospital and surgeon Philip Coram, on whom she’s had a slight crush, but of course, “he could hardly have been more impersonal and was sometimes cruelly critical.” But on her way out the door, he stops her and tells her she’s one of the best nurses he’s known, asks her what her plans are—and, curiously, what her name is—and when she says she’s going into private nursing, he says he’ll ask for her for his patients.

He calls her for the job of wrestling wealthy and self-centered widowed dowager Mrs. van Elten across the ocean to New York, and it’s worth reading this book just to meet Mrs. van Elten. She’s a salty, outspoken, smart, hilarious, manipulative, and kindly grande dame, and she is Fabulous! Then, just as she’s to leave for the trip, Anne receives a letter from a long-lost cousin, Paula Weston, who has somehow tracked her down, following up the efforts of Anne’s father Donald, who had moved to Australia and died a year ago without ever locating Anne. Paula and her brother Glen live in Maryland and are eager to meet their new cousin, who now will be not as far from them when she finishes her job with Mrs. van Elten. But Anne’s best friend Karen, who “had what she called hunches,” is uneasy about the whole thing, and Anne herself catches a “deep and ominous chill” as the boat pulls out of the Southampton harbor en route for the New World. She’s warmed to the core a few minutes later, though, when she learns that Dr. Coram is sailing on the same boat, bound for medical conferences in New York!

Needless to say, Mrs. van Elton instantly divines Anne’s interest in Dr. Coram, and starts to work on the pair. “I find people intensely interesting,” she tells Anne. “My daughter says I can’t mind my own business about them. But I like to advise and praise and criticize. Particularly to criticize.” Though Mrs. van Elton warns Anne that Dr. Coram is engaged, she still schools Anne on what color dress to wear and insists that Anne stay at the dances after she herself has turned in, the better to dance with the doctor. Anne’s relationship with Dr. Coram grows organically, and soon they’re on the Lido Deck under the stars, but Anne remembers the fiancée at home and becomes chilly just when things start to heat up. After they land in New York, Dr. Coram goes way beyond the call of duty to drive Anne the five hours from New York to her cousins’ house, which is a decaying former country estate; as it turns out, the cousins’ father had gambled away most of the family fortune and they are barely able to keep the place.

Cousin Glen is a smarmy sort of fellow, and his “almost beautiful smile never touched his handsome eyes, which remained hard and curiously inscrutable.” He’s instantly all over Anne, insisting that she marry him, and tells her that Dr. Coram, who had grown up in the area, had “played fast and loose with one or two girls in Washington, it seems, and he got quite a bad name in a set where it takes really something to make people talk.” This runs completely counter to everything Anne knows about Dr. Coram, but she starts to feel less about him, the dope, when it’s completely clear what’s Glen is really up to. There are many other obvious warnings about the cousins’ ulterior motives: A letter written by Anne’s father has been “accidentally” destroyed, and—curse the postal system!—so has another letter sent to her in care of her cousins from a Sydney attorney who, Karen says, is looking for Anne to give her good news about her father’s estate. Then Anne meets the old, slightly senile man who had been a groom on the estate for 50 years, who tells her that her father was rich and that the cousins are trying to get her money. Does the penny drop? No!

When Dr. Coram arrives to bring her back to New York two days later, Anne is completely rude to him, all but slamming the door in his face, and thanks for the ride, bub. The author suggests that Anne is so enthralled with the idea of having a family at last—“it gives one a sort of confidence and security to find a place and a family where one belongs,” she tells Dr. Coram—and Anne genuinely likes Paula, who deserves it, and Glen, who does not—which sets her up to believe what is an obvious ploy to get Dr. Coram out of the picture. And then she’s deeply flattered to be the object of affection for the first time in her life: “It was so utterly wonderful to feel that someone—perhaps, above all, her big, handsome warm-hearted cousin—thought her all-important.” So it is possible, given Anne’s background, that she could be this stupid—but it’s not well-sold to the readers, who can’t help wanting to give Anne a hard shake.

But then Mrs. van Elten drops a bomb—the fiancée is just a myth she’d created to keep Anne from running after Dr. Coram, thinking that “if he were made to do the running, you were just the right girl for him,” as she explains. Fortunately, Anne has the strength of character to call up the abused doctor and apologize profusely, and the pair are restored to friendly terms. But then Mrs. van Elten goes to Florida, freeing Anne to go back to her cousins’ house, and there our suspicions of them pile up—until finally even Anne can’t deny that something terrible is afoot, and when she sneaks out of the house to visit the old retired groom again, he suggests that the cousins might kill her for the money! Finally coming to her senses, she puts on a happy face, makes a frantic call to Dr. Coram to come get her tomorrow, and goes to her bedroom to lock herself in, but the key to her bedroom door has been taken! She stuffs her money in her dress, jumps out the bathroom window, and runs away—but Glen is coming after her in the car! Oh, no!! What will happen next?!?

Overall, this is a lovely book, with a truly outstanding character in Mrs. van Elten (she reminded me of Lady Travitt in Nurse Stacey Comes Aboard, though that book does not come close to this one) and a relationship between the lovers that grows honestly. Its biggest flaw is the fact that Anne is such a dunce about people, and the tragedy is that I think that an author who has given us a book this good could, with a bit more effort, have made Anne’s gullibility more understandable, so we might have wanted to smack Anne upside the head fewer than the two dozen times I did—especially at the end, when she makes a bizarre decision about the money she’s inherited. The title and the cover illustration are both more than a little perplexing, but we can’t pin those sins on Ida Cook, here writing as Mary Burchell, who likely had nothing to do with either. But overlook the strange envelope, and you will enjoy what you find inside it, if your evil cousins don’t destroy it first.

Doctor Ellen

Adèle De Leeuw, ©1944
Cover Illustration by Rudy Nappi 

Lovely Ellen Paige met a host of violent reactions every time she reaffirmed her intention of being a doctor. “It’s—well, it’s so unfeminine,” her sister Joyce said. “It’s hard for a man; it’s even harder for a woman,” kindly Dr. Seth warned. “I want a doctor—one with pants on,” complained and injured patient. “No woman should be a doctor—and you least of all,” handsome Tim Flagg fellow student, commented. The old prejudice against woman physicians was still very much alive, but Ellen waged her battle staunchly, determined to be a doctor as well as a woman—and to be accepted as both.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“What’s the idea? Trying to titillate the optic nerve unduly?”

“It must be fun to be young.”

REVIEW:
Doctor Ellen hits the ground with a nauseating bang when our protagonist “flung back the covers and leaped out of bed” and “sang out”—first thing in the morning, mind you!—“Morning, Mums!” It’s a wonder I managed to press on to the second sentence. The ensuing pages are admittedly less alarming, but they are stuffed with the misogynist stereotypes that Ellen is battling as she begins her third year of medical school: “Do you have to wear those awfully mannish suits all the time?” Mums asks. “It’s—well, it’s so unfeminine,” says sister Joyce, who doesn’t think Ellen will ever get married if she insists on going through with this doctor thing. “Girls don’t make good doctors!” says little brother Bill, and somehow Ellen refrains from smacking his fat head. “No woman should be a doctor,” says medical student Tim Flagg, who thinks Ellen should instead be his wife: “It’s my mission in life to persuade you you’ve made a mistake.”

There’s also the institutionalized sexism, such as the fact that “the men students had automatically been enrolled in the Army, their training supervised, their tuition paid for. But the women students had to struggle along as best they could, with prospects as lean as ever and, of course, no financial aid forthcoming.” The anatomy professor takes “special delight in baiting ‘hen medics,’ in making it hard for them and quizzing them unmercifully. He addressed himself to the men; the women were their only on sufferance, and he ignored them as much as possible.”

We watch with lifted brow while Ellen allows cave man Tim to pick her up at the train station, take her to dinner and deliver her to her rooming house, all the while cheerfully submitting to his sexist inanities. Once we get to the rooming house, however, Ellen starts to redeem herself when she meets a new boarder, Frances Tyndall, with a skeptical glance of her own. “So that’s her line, is it? Little, innocent, and helpless,” Ellen thinks snarkily to herself after the girl bats her eyelashes at the dinner table, and we like her more for it. “Being homesick and terrified and appealing all within three minutes—if this was a sample of the Tyndall mind and conversation, she saw a trying year ahead.”

And, over the ensuing pages, Ellen Paige grows on you. Like the irritating Frances, “She hadn’t been easy to live with at first, but in the painful process of growing up she had endeared herself to them.” Most of the book follows Ellen in the day-to-day of school, an externship, patients, successes and failures. She befriends a nice young wannabe surgeon Andrew McKenzie, who makes a point of stopping her after a class during which she had diagnosed a patient as having a glass eye and been subjected to the ridicule of her classmates—and little appreciation when it had turned out that she was right. “That was a brilliant piece of work,” Andrew tells her, and she answers, “There weren’t any other congratulations, though,” and our hopes begin to lift that maybe Tim won’t star in the final chapter—though he does give us quite a scare at Christmas after he wins over every single person in Ellen’s family, including Joyce’s babies and the hard-boiled cook.

Early on we sense the usual tragedy-in-the-slums trope bearing down on us when Ellen complains, “What’s that matter with cities that they can’t see the sores festering in their midst? The dirt and the slums and the rottenness? It seems like working in a circle. People studying to be doctors, men inventing medicines and cures and machines and gadgets to make life better and never getting at the root of the evil, the conditions that make sick people and criminals and poverty.” After a visit to a paralyzed child who is left alone all day in the dark while her mother works, during which a rat runs over Ellen’s shoe, Ellen gets all hot and bothered, and Andrew introduces her to a reporter, and before long there are speeches and donations and political upheaval, and a lot fewer rats in town. Ellen also works to bring Easter and Christmas celebrations to the Children’s Ward, and purpose to the life of a nurse’s aide whose husband is off fighting in the war—fairly standard stuff, it must be confessed, but presented without too much treacle.

The writing is solid and occasionally humorous, and author Adele De Leeuw, an acclaimed children’s author who wrote more than fifty books, was here in mid-career. This story is not as fluffy as it could have been; there are truly tragic characters, including one very impoverished female medical student who is forced to drop out of school to care for her siblings after her mother is incapacitated by stroke, and the paralyzed girl who inspired the rat extermination crusade. The overwhelming theme of the book seems to be learning to stand on your own, to have confidence in yourself to do the right thing. “You don’t get your strength from playing to the gallery, only from yourself,” Andrew tells her, and as the last two years of medical school pass, we watch Ellen’s confidence grow out of almost-failures, out of tragedy, out of success that isn’t just luck but earned through hard work. I would love to know what prompted De Leeuw to turn out this book, which thought it must have required a great deal of research appears to have been her only attempt at medical fiction (though she wrote three nonfiction books about nurses). But if you are going to write only one VNRN, it should be, as this is, one to be proud of.

A Prize for Nurse Darci

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1965

Darci Betton loved being a nurse, but at the writers’ conference she discovered a glamorous new world. It almost made her forget Dr. Mark Garrett whose last angry words were branded on her heart. When Jerome Sinclair, the famous writer and Darci’s private idol, showed more than a passing interest, Darci’s new world seemed perfect. Would a new love help her forget the old?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“You wouldn’t want us coming on duty without our coffee, would you doctor? We might give a heart stimulant to that patient who sneaks liquor into his room, and then you’d really have something to complain about.” 

“I’m not even so sure it’s a good thing for the patients to read poetry. Maybe they ought to be resting instead of reading.”

“Being around you makes me want to go out and get myself a job in a munitions factory. I feel as if I’d like to help murder the human race, instead of trying to help it.”

“Look here, I was about to kiss you. And suddenly you’re telling me I ought to have X-rays or something! What kind of a romance is this, for Pete’s sake?”

“Darci almost wished she had fainted. It would have been so nice to be in his arms and be carried to the couch and worried about.”

REVIEW:
I will confess that I’ve had this book on my shelf for some time but have been loath to pick it up, because my experience with Suzanne Roberts has not been particularly enjoyable. Unfortunately, she’s written at least 14 nurse novels, of which I’ve endured only half (every one of them earning a C grade of some sort), and though it’s all right for you to steer clear, it’s my self-appointed job to plow through these bombs—and hopefully my pain will save you some. To that end, let this stand as a warning to avoid drippy Darci Anne Betton, who is a shallow, spineless, insipid patsy. 

She is, though, a very dedicated nurse, and when the new ward resident, Dr. Mark Garrett, shows up, she’s determined to impress him. But he’s a mean, nasty tyrant who has imposed a slate of new rules for the floor—including a three-minute time limit for coffee breaks, even though it takes five minutes to get from the 10th floor ward to the cafeteria. Of course, it’s utterly unrealistic that a doctor could have the authority to insist on these things, and this one’s only a resident, not even an attending! Every nurse on the floor is putting in for transfers except Darci, who thinks, “When he doesn’t look angry—he has the nicest mouth”—the trouble being that he always looks angry.

The good news is that she’s won a story-writing contest, and the prize is free tuition at a writer’s conference, which miraculously falls on exactly the same two weeks as her upcoming vacation. The big draw for the conference is famous but fading writer Jerry Sinclair, who phones Darci at 3:00 a.m. to ask her to pick him up at the airport and have dinner with him. Instead of banging down the receiver on the inconsiderate, selfish ass, “She closed her eyes, joy going through her. ‘I’ll meet your plane, Mr. Sinclair,’ she said eagerly.”

Meeting the man, it is clear that he is a horror show—for starters, he doesn’t let her drive her own car. He’s a slimy type out to use Darci for his own purposes, and it’s certainly not hard to imagine why a writer might be pumping this naïve young woman for details about working in a hospital. Darci, curiously, sees it too—but when he takes her parking, “it might have been pure feminine instinct that made Darci sit very still, not talking, her hand as quiet as a tame bird, there in Jerry’s.” We are not surprised to find, then, that she absolutely cannot say no to the man, and instead foolishly seems to be talking herself into falling in love with him: “Am I falling in love with him? And, she wondered, if this was love. She had even mentioned the possibility that she might be in love. At the time, she had felt a little bit foolish. But now she wasn’t sorry at all she had written to her girlfriend and admitted she might be in love. Because right now, at this very moment, whatever it was she was feeling was either love or hero worship.”

Whatever it was, Jerry quickly proves himself deserving of neither, as he monopolizes her time, manipulates and guilts her into seeing him, and repeatedly insists he’s completely dependent on Darci—and he treats the conference students cruelly and unprofessionally, as well. “I was shook up because I’d phoned you and you didn’t answer my calls. That made me everything seem so—hopeless,” the stalker tells her, jealous of the time she spent writing a letter to her roommate. “Just stay with me. I need you, little girl.” Rather than run to the police department and file for a restraining order, Darci the Dope thinks, “He was probably one of the most intelligent and fascinating men in the world. Wasn’t it true that what she had was the beginning of a very hard crush on this man? And wasn’t it also true that their beloved image of Jerry had begun to fade?” Because Darci always wants to have everything both ways, even fantasizing about grumpy Dr. Garrett, who suddenly “seemed both challenging and exciting.” She has two assholes in her life, and “they were both strangely secretive and moody, and yet, Darci felt an odd tenderness and warmth towards both of them.”

As Jerry pumps her harder for details about the hospital, even Darci starts to edge away—but when the conference ends, Jerry cons her into allowing him to move to her hometown and show him around the hospital. She fears Jerry is writing an expose about the hospital, but nonetheless dutifully trots him around the hospital and introduces him to everyone. Lo and behold, Jerry eventually admits he is writing a scandalous tell-all. “Darci felt an odd sensation of fear go through her. She felt like running from Jerry in that moment and yet, he wasn’t really mean or cruel, or even cunning.” I’m not sure who she’s fooling, because we have seen him be all these things—frankly, seldom is he anything else.

Since she came home lugging Jerry Sinclair with her, Dr. Garrett has been especially frosty. But that never stops Darci—suddenly “she was in love with him. She was in love with that cold, angry man who could be so gentle with a patient but so unbending with the girl who worked side by side with him all day long.” Nurse Darci Betton is a bona fide nut case. But Mark won’t date her, so she keeps going out with her other lunatic. In his room, waiting for Jerry while he showers before another of their dates, she finds his manuscript and reads the lurid tell-all he’s written, which includes a near-miss medication error of her roommate’s, and the suggestion that at a prior job Mark’s negligence had killed a patient. Who saw that coming? Again proving herself psychotic, she wonders, “Could she still go on loving Mark if what Jerry had written was true? […] Darci tried to think more kindly of Jerry.” Really, this woman should just start dating axe murderers and be done with it.

She runs to Mark’s apartment to warn him and he tells her the story Jerry has uncovered—as an intern he had witnessed a car crash, pulled a victim from the wreckage, and the woman had died shortly afterward. This is the sort of “scandal” that frequently befalls people in nurse novels—they can’t in any way be blamed for it, but the hospital turns their actions into a terrible crime, making it a pathetic cop out. The pair end up kissing, and the next day Darci is a wreck, because “the two of them made rounds, attended patients, subbed in Emergency during noon time, and nothing at all was said. No plans were made for the future.” Apparently one kiss means it’s time to start picking out china patterns—not in the coming months, but immediately, and never mind the important work they should be concentrating on. “How can I talk to you about marrying me?” Mark rightfully asks, less than 24 hours after their first kiss—even if “it was a stop-the-world kind of kiss.”

Darci is in love with love, and getting married is her main objective—she’ll talk herself into the first ogre that comes along, and we should not be surprised, because on page three of this book we’re told “Neither girl was in love, but, of course, both of them hoped to be. Falling in love at the Center was something just about every nurse did.” Even her “plump” roommate is planning a wedding, to a patient whose sling she’d changed a couple weeks earlier. This book paints a horrific picture of the lives of young women, not to mention marriage, and I shudder to think of all the kids who’d read this fifty years ago and imagined that this was what they were supposed to be—compliant yet grasping, blind bits of putty whose main objective was to convince a man—any man, no matter how unworthy or even insane—to slip a diamond onto her hand. This book is just depressing.