Second Year Nurse

By Margaret McCulloch, ©1957
Cover illustration by Ethel Gold 

From the window by her patient’s bed, Jan looked down on the entrance to the nurses’ home. As she watched, a familiar green car swung around the drive. A moment later Dorinda came briskly down the front steps and took her place beside the driver. “Dr. Bartholomew, the young surgeon, wasn’t it?” the patient asked. “I didn’t recognize the nurse.” So this was what the other nurses had been trying to tell her. Dorinda—her own roommate—was dating Hank Bartholomew too!

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“I guess it’s all a part of growing up. Learning to like what you’re doing—instead of always doing what you like.” 

“‘Washington’s Birthday is such fun,’ she told Jan when she invited her. ‘All the cute little hatchets and cherries and things.’”

REVIEW: 
I’ve been thinking about the difference between VNRNs that are written for a teenage audience compared to those intended for adults. This is the third that I can recall having reviewed (see also Candy Stripers and Mary Adams Student Nurse), and they do generally seem more superficial, unsophisticated, and condescending than the grown-up variety, and the heroine never actually ends up with a fiancé, much less a serious boyfriend. And so I waded through Second Year Nurse, which needed its 222 pages to introduce us to at least 75 different characters (I lost count), many of them patients with stories only casually touched on before moving on to the next paragraph. Even patients who we are told affect our eponymous nursing student Jan Russell deeply, such as a young woman with an infant son and husband who dies inexplicably before her thyroidectomy, we receive in just a couple paragraphs, turning the page on them with no real experience of Jan’s feelings or any lingering effects of the tragedy.

Though most of the book is about the many, many other students and patients Jan encounters, she also has a few boyfriends. Her high school steady, Randy, dumps her early on when she leaves for nursing school: After she insists, “I’m crazy about my nursing and I’m going right on with it,” he snarls, “Go on back to your bellhopping and bedmaking! You might even catch yourself a medic. That’s all nurses go in training for.” So between hospital shifts and classes, she accepts a few dates with Dr. Hank Bartholomew. Though “it was still hard for Jan to call him Hank,” she decides that “recently there’d been an increasing depth in their relationship. Not that there’d been any mention of marriage,” we are told, because that’s usually what happens after the third date. Well, I could be wrong on that point because soon Dr. Bartholomew is dating her roommate Dorinda, the daughter of a wealthy woman who serves on the hospital board of trustees—not that that has anything to do with it—and eight pages after what is apparently Dorinda’s first date with the doctor, she is sporting an engagement ring, so maybe there is something to it after all.

Jan also has about three dates with Bruce Baird, who works in the lab and also as a janitor to earn money to put himself through medical school—and he’s hoping to become a general practitioner like Jan’s father had been. But he is usually pretty busy, so she doesn’t see him much. Then, toward the end of the book, Randy’s mother is seriously ill and Jan assists in caring for her, so now Randy decides maybe nursing isn’t so bad, after all. “I think it’s a marvelous thing for a girl to do,” he admits. “I was awfully dumb.” Which man will Jan end up with? Well, like I mentioned at the start, these teen books don’t really give you much of a love story to close the book on, so on the last page all we see is Jan is running down the stairs happily for her next date.

I’m not really sure what the focus of this story is, because it doesn’t offer many details about actual nursing, nor does it give you a romance. Essentially stopping in the middle, the book gives us no resolution to Jan’s plans for her career or her love life, and 222 pages is a lot to spend on a story that goes nowhere. I can only conclude from my admittedly small sample that teen readers weren’t taken very seriously in the 1950s and 1960s—I understand that attitude is what in part what inspired the Woodstock era—so I can’t recommend that an intelligent adult such as yourself spend your time with a book that doesn’t respect its readers.

Candy Stripers

By Lee Wyndham, ©1958

Bonnie Schuyler let herself be talked into joining the Candy Stripers. As a junior aide at the Medical Center, she lightened the heavy work load each regular nurse had. But she sometimes wondered why she was there—she didn’t plan to be a nurse; it was hard work; she didn’t especially like helping other people. One day she met David, a technician who was interested in a hospital career. Somehow he made her feel rather special and very grown-up.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Mother thought she should consider teaching or library work. It was ‘safe,’ she said. People would always need teachers, and librarians were scarce.”

“Down, Mavis, Down. You are a riot. No maidenly reserve at all.”

“Cliff didn’t know she was alive, and now that she thought of it again, it was rather maddening. It could ruin a girl’s ego.”

REVIEW:

Candy Stripers pushes the boundaries of nurse novel, given that it’s about 15-year-old Bonnie Schuyler’s summer as the eponymous candy striper—with an avowed disinclination to ever work as a nurse, much less as a candy striper after this miserable summer is over—who may flirt with a number of boys but ends the book firmly decided that she is going to see lots of boys and not just Rock Caldwell, who she’s been dating pretty steadily. Patently wholesome teenager treacle, but she’s not wrong; as nurse novels go, she’ll likely be married in half a dozen years, so she should play the field while she still has a chance.

Bonnie starts out the book as a fairly petulant spoiled brat, upset that her family is going to rent out their summer home in New Jersey this year in order to save money for her to go to college: “You know,” explains kindly dad, “college for each of you girls will cost two thousand a year and then some. Multiplied by four years apiece that’s a pretty staggering amount.” With two kids in college this year myself and the annual bills running six figures, I’m absolutely staggered that this family is going to get through it all for under $10K apiece. But rather than being grateful that her folks are picking up the tab for her education, Bonnie thinks it is just not fair! “It would be a shoreless, dateless,  horrid, dull, boring summer.” Until neighbor Nancy talks her into becoming a candy striper.

While she and the other new recruits are a little nervous--“I’ve never seen a strange man in a bathrobe before!” shrieks one—it won’t be all hard work: “When you come  here after school, cookies and milk will be served. You are girls on whom we depend, and so we shall see to it that you are well nourished,” says the head of volunteers.

Bonnie has frankly mixed feelings about it, enjoying some parts of the job but fuming about the nerve some nurses have of insisting on their high standards: “Who did Miss Winters think she was, anyway! Here they were volunteers—donating their time—and she treated them in this high and mighty manner,” after Bonnie and a couple other girls were caught fooling around with the cranks on a hospital bed and getting it stuck in a most awkward position. “There was no justice or understanding in that woman, Bonnie thought resentfully,” on another occasion when she’d gone to drop off a specimen at the lab, not come back for an hour when she stopped to flirt with handsome lab tech David, and gotten chewed out on her return. She’s not really fond of working: “‘What do we actually do?’ Bonnie asked, uneasily, hoping that it wasn’t too much. After all, she didn’t have Nancy’s passion for the work.” Again and again, even as we move into the end of the book, we are reminded that Bonnie is “one of the least devoted,” not really interested in helping people. “Why did everyone assume that she was mad about this work? She wasn’t. She was merely finishing a job she had undertaken—much too lightheartedly and impulsively. Whatever else this summer might teach her, one thing Bonnie would never do was jump into anything again!”

There are some stories of patients who triumph over adversity and Bonnie’s small role in helping them, as well as others who die, including a kid hit by a car, that actually do seem to penetrate Bonnie’s hard, selfish heart. So does that cute guy David who she chases all summer and finally maneuvers into a corner. “Oh David, I’m so in love with you,” she blurts out, and he, shocked, points out that he’s a college graduate seven years older than her. “You’re still such a baby,” he says, apparently expecting, in typical male fashion, that this is going to make her feel better. You will not be surprised that Bonnie spends pages wallowing in her grief, ducking into the linen closets to sob: “Oh, David, David! She wept brokenly.” After watching her not care about anything up until now, it’s hard to feel anything for her except a thin disgust.

True to form, when Nancy offers Bonnie a ticket to the end-of-summer capping ceremony—candy stripers with two years of service get to wear a cap—“it meant almost nothing to Bonnie at that moment,” but she manages to agree to go. “Bonnie smiled perfunctorily. No caps for her. She had almost done what she had signed up to do, and then she would forget it.” During the ceremony she isn’t even paying attention when the nursing director describes how the candy stripers have helped patients, recalling actions that Bonnie herself had taken for a burned baby. It isn’t until the candles are lit and the girls kneeling on a cushion to be capped, “like a benediction,” when “the newly capped girls were renewing their pledge of service, purity, integrity,” that Bonnie perks up. “The faces of the capped girls, in the glow of their candles, were almost ethereal. There was joy and dedication in them—an almost holy purity.” Suddenly Bonnie is rethinking it all: “This business of serving others, of being considered a responsible individual, needed. There was a peculiar satisfaction that went with all that. Until this summer she had flitted through life concerned mostly with having fun. And now, suddenly, she could no longer deny the strong pull of the hospital.” Now she’s planning on getting her own cap, and “she might decide to be a nurse, or a technician; even a doctor, maybe!”

This book was clearly written for a teen audience, so condescending and preachy is its tone. Pity the poor kids, and not just the ones Bonnie is forced to take care of. Bonnie, who is self-absorbed and sanctimonious throughout this book, in the last five pages undergoes a completely unbelievable transformation prompted, it seems, by a religious sentiment infusing the capping ceremony that for all its talk of “purity” could be confused for nuns taking their vows. When we leave Bonnie on the last pages, she has become someone completely different, dedicated to serving humanity, dating many boys but none seriously (i.e. maintaining her purity), contemplating “a new year on the way. A year of fun and school, and helping at the Medical Center—and who knew where that might lead! But for now, being a Candy Striper and just living would be enough!” In other words, what any ’50s era girl is supposed to be. I almost think I liked shallow Bonnie better, because at least she wasn’t a conformist cookie-cutter.

Mary Adams, Student Nurse

By Alice Brennan, ©1964

Cover illustration by Robert Maguire

Every time Mary Adams, student nurse, entered the hospital she felt exhilarated and excited. Her blue eyes shone with the pride of wearing her white cap. But the cap was only the beginning. She still had to earn the right to wear the white uniform of the graduate  nurse. Her days were very full. She carried a full schedule of classes: biology, anatomy, physiology. And there was her “on duty” time. Each day Mary saw the drama of a big-city hospital. Birth, death and disease were part of her life now. And she loved every minute of it … until the day she found that heartbreak was also part of a nurse’s life and she had to learn to accept the responsibility of growing up.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“Blondes usually turn out to be cold and egotistical.”

“I don’t know why everyone has to think I’m a louse just because I’m prettier than the rest of you.”

“Interns don’t bite. We can’t afford to.”

REVIEW:

I just finished this book last week, and now I’m damned if I can remember a single thing about it. Part of the problem may be the fact, advertised nowhere on the outside of the book, is that this is a “Juvenile Nurse Novel,” apparently a genre of its own in the day, much like the Young Adult Supernatural Romance section I saw in Barnes and Noble recently. Maybe there’s not much going on because it’s geared toward kids. So this book is really about the hijinks of Mary Adams and her best two nursing school friends. They have an arch-nemesis in Hope, who is mean to everyone, but it turns out Hope’s dad is a raging alcoholic who abandoned his child with distant relatives, so she’s had an unhappy, bitter life and trusts no one. Now that Hope is in nursing school, he’s turned up, apparently just to tell her he’s proud of her, but she won’t have anything to do with him, even when he becomes desperately ill with cirrhosis and needs a porto-caval shunt, and she’s the only person who can sign consent.

On the lighter side, there are boys to go out with, cafeteria meals to grouch about (“Cold spinach and stew again! With lumpy gravy yet!”), exams to study for, patients to care too much about (little Timmy with the bad heart, for starters).  The dorm does not catch on fire, surprisingly (see A Nurse Is Born, Night-Duty Nurse, When Doctors Marry, Nurse Landon’s Challenge), and I would say it’s even more surprising, if this weren’t a book for teens, that Mary does not end up engaged at the end. Instead, on the last page, the boy she seems to like most tells her, “I could get very serious about you,” and she answers, “It’s nice the way it is, Bob. Let’s not—not rush anything.” If Mary Adams is so sanctimonious that she’s the only person who can see everyone’s point of view and therefore can’t dislike even the relentlessly nasty Hope, it’s still a pleasant enough book. You won’t remember it a day later, but maybe its vapid sweetness will linger like the faint smell of cookies that came out of the oven an hour ago.