Spotlight on Nurse Thorne

By Tracy Adams
(pseud. Sofi O’Bryan), ©1962

Inspired by her medical student fiancé, Cindy Thorne abandoned her acting career to become a nurse. But the details of medical training and the strain of awaiting his return made her question her decision. Was her dedication to helping humanity strong enough to counter the excitement of a new appearance behind the footlights and the charm of an intriguing leading man?

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“With a love scene like that you’ll give all the doctors high blood pressure and they’ll kick you out of nursing, baby.”

“My heart is in real bad shape, suffering from a stenosis there’s no name for.”

REVIEW:
Cindy Thorne is a former child star with a haranguing stage mother who has lost her chance at glory by association when the child in question opted for a more pedestrian career: While researching a role at a hospital, Cindy met this intern, Bruce, and soon decided to chuck Hollywood for nursing school so she could help him when he goes into practice. (But it’s also apparent that Hollywood had dropped Cindy as well, as she had become too old to play a child, and roles for older girls weren’t forthcoming.)

When the book opens, Cindy is a few months from graduating from nursing school, and her class has decided to stage a production of My Fair Lady. Cindy, of course, lands the lead. There’s this intern, Ted Morrow, who qualifies for the part of Henry Higgins basically by being cute, but he comes with the extra advantage that he’s already pining for his leading lady. As play rehearsals progress, Cindy spends a lot of time thinking about how much she loves being on the stage and asking herself if nursing is really the right career for her. Oh, and dating – and kissing – Ted, despite her being all but engaged to Bruce. As graduation and opening night approach, her internal struggles increase in frequency and amplitude, until both are over and Cindy is heading out for a celebratory night on the town with Bruce, planning to tell him that she’s going to quit nursing before her shiny new RN pin has even cooled. Then their cab is brought to a halt in a traffic jam caused by a fire in the subway near the Times building on 42nd Street – and she and Bruce are simultaneously tumbling out onto the street to go help the injured. Somehow this instinctive reaction completely negates all those pages of internal turmoil, and “she belonged in this white uniform, in these white oxfords and white stockings. She wouldn’t exchange places with any other girl in the world.”

I’ve spent the morning wondering what to say about this book. As you can see from the pair of paragraphs above, there’s not really much to say. It’s mildly pleasant, but it has next to no camp or humor, and it’s a bit earnest for my taste, with too much fretting over how emotionally demanding nursing is. The cast of characters is overly large; we whiz past 12 other nursing students, getting to know just one, who is unfortunately a bit irritating. Our brief exposure to Bruce – he doesn’t even have a last name – is not enough to make for a satisfying ending when she chooses him over Ted. I was also somewhat taken aback, given Cindy’s previously strong conviction that she needed to be an actress, that she could reverse herself for apparently no more of reason than that she reached for a car door handle in a moment of crisis. In the end, the spotlight is focused on a fickle nurse engaged to a stranger, and I’m more than ready to leave the theater.

Nurse Liza Hale

By Jane Corby, ©1965
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

“I’m so frightened!” The terrified girl who had appeared out of the night at Liza’s door clung to her, sobbing.
“Please,” Liza said, “try to tell me what’s the matter.”
“The noises,” the girl said. “As if someone was tearing down the house. It’s haunted! But my husband won’t believe me. He thinks I’m …”
Psychiatric nurse Liza Hale thought she knew what lay behind her lovely neighbor’s panic—the tragedy of mental illness. But the truth was stranger and more sinister—and, disregarding the warning of the young doctor who loved her, Liza soon found herself in a maze of mystery of menace … with no way out!

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Dr. Kimberly did, however, look at Liza with interest. Liza thought he was probably looking for signs of mental disturbance.”

“Psychiatrists! I suppose it’s all right to work with them if that’s your job, but I certainly wouldn’t let one of them near Harriet. They’re home-wreckers. Why, I know of several marriages that were broken up because the wife went to be psychoanalyzed.”

“They watched the rest of the show together and danced later in the center of the room, while music from records encouraged them to join the others in experimenting with novel twists and turns and inspired gyrations of every kind.”

“I’ll go barefoot if you have the stage floor sanded. I don’t want to get splinters in my feet. I might get lockjaw. Long Island used to be farming country, you know, and there may be tetanus germs around.”

“When you’re in the Village, you have to talk as the Villagers do, or they won’t dig you.”

“I’m neither rich nor famous—yet, but with you beside me, I know I soon would be. There’s something about you, Liza, a kind of warmth, that is what a man needs if he’s to make a success in life.”

“Now we’re in our twenties—grown up!”

“You must know, Liza, it’s hard for a man to keep his hands off you.”

“ ‘My pockets aren’t big enough to hold them all,’ she said after a while. She eyed the capacious pockets of Bret’s seersucker suit longingly.”

REVIEW:
The back cover blurb wants to make this book out to be some sort of mystery, but there is no secret whatsoever as to what is going on in the house next door. Nurse Liza Hale is helping two doctors research a book on the drug treatment of psychiatric illnesses—“Dr. Mathews thinks that in time this kind of treatment will supercede most of the other types,” she explains—when newlywed Harriet Duane knocks on her door, saying that she hears noises and she thinks they are made by a ghost. She is a wealthy, naïve 20-year-old mouse from Atlanta, and Liza immediately thinks that Harriet would make a good case study for Dr. Mathews’ book.

Harriet’s husband Charles, age 35, has “a narrow-eyed, supercilious face with a wisp of carefully shaped moustache above an arrogant mouth.” When Liza sees the couple at a party a few days later, Charles finds a pair of pearl earrings that Harriet denies having worn, and he suggests that Harriet is under mental strain, saying things like, “Now, Harriet, you know how easily you forget things.” Dr. Bret Kimberley, the younger psychiatrist who is working with Dr. Mathews, immediately sees that Charles is a rat with something up his sleeve. Liza, the astute trained professional, responds, “Don’t analyze him; he’s simply upset about his wife. He’s very distinguished-looking and cultured, and he’s deeply in love with Harriet.” Not too many pages later, though, Charles’s suggesting that Harriet should be instionalized because she doesn’t like the wallpaper in the sitting room where Charles forces her to sit quietly for hours every day. I want to think this is a reference to The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, but I’m not too optimistic.

In between arguments with Bret about whether Charles is a devoted husband or a ruthless con man, she is pursued by Don, a high school chum chasing a career in the theater, who attempts to persuade her to give up nursing for acting. In addition to acting, of course, Don wants Liza to take on the role of his wife, and asks her if she loves him. “I’m afraid not,” Liza answers, in a novel response for a VNRN (and I do think we were meant to chuckle here). She goes on to explain, “I can’t see myself as your partner, rooting for your success, while I stumble along in a minor acting role myself.” Apparently remaining in nursing while he works as an actor is not an option. She thinks that nursing is a far more noble profession: “Nursing was real. That would be thrill enough for her—to see people whole and happy through her participation as part of a team, working side by side with a doctor, not only content but elated as she carried out his orders.” It’s curious that she won’t marry Don because she doesn’t want to be second-rate to him, yet seems totally oblivious to the fact that as a nurse, she may be literally at the doctor’s side, but carrying out orders, no matter how elatedly, does not make her an equal.

It isn’t too long before Dr. Mathews spots a squib in the paper saying that a Mrs. Charles Duane of Chicago is looking for her missing husband, who has absconded with all her money. Liza then reveals that Harriet has told her that Charles is angling for power of attorney, is angry that Harriet wants to consult her own lawyer, and thinks she ought to spend a few weeks in a rest home. “What can we do to protect Harriet?” Liza asks the doctor. “Nothing, I’m afraid,” says the doctor, who is apparently unaware of the existance of the police force. “I always distrusted him,” Bret chimes in, and Liza, in an abrupt about-face, defends Charles by saying, “Oh, you’re just antisocial.” Later, when they hear on the radio that police are looking for this Chicago Charles Duane, Liza comments, “It may not be our Charles Duane,” and nobody bothers to drop a dime to the boys in blue.

When it is finally revealed that the two are one and the same, Liza has no explanation or self-recrimination as to why she has been such a complete dope. Totally distraught, Harriet tries to kill herself by cutting her wrists, but “only succeeded in making mere scratches.” The next day, Harriet apologizes for the trouble she’s caused the doctors, and Liza is finally able to put her years of training as a psychiatric nurse to clincial use: “ ‘You should be!’ scolded Liza. “Think how good they’ve been to you—and they’re such busy people, too!’ ” Psychiatrist Bret shares Liza’s concern for Harriet’s mental health, referring to Harriet’s crisis as “that silly slashed-wrist business.”

There is some humor in the story and the writing isn’t bad, but it’s full of dead-end side trips, including a major hurricane that renders some of the characters homeless, a shelter for battered women, a missing child and a childless couple, and a traumatic incident from Harriet’s childhood that undermines the idea that Harriet is not mentally incompetent. Its biggest flaw, however, is the heroine’s utter stupidity in regards to the true situation with Harriet and Charles Duane. When an allegedly intelligent woman with highly specialized training is unable to see what we have known since page 8, I just can’t like the book.

Doctor Diane's Decision

By Ruby L. Radford, ©1961
Cover illustration by Len Goldberg

Since her teens, Diane Maxwell’s devouring ambition had been to become a physisicn. Midway in her studies, however, Diane decided to be a surgeon and now, in her third year of residency at Edmunds Hospital, she looked forward to the day when she would work with the famed Dr. Roger Fulton. It was a fine spring day when Hal Fulton, Dr. Roger’s son, came back to town—to upset the well-ordered course Diane had plotted for herself. For Hal, eager to make Diane his bride, was also toying with the idea of forsaking medicine and following a career in the theatre. This pervasive interest of Hal’s was to bring Diane to the attention of a brilliant young playwright—and lead her to two important decisions.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTE:
“Annette had IT with capital letters.”

REVIEW:
Some vintage nurse romance novels (VNRNs) seem to have just been dashed off, without much care or thought, and Doctor Diane’s Decision is just such a book. Dr. Diane Maxwell is in her third year of residency as an OB/GYN surgeon at a hospital in Georgia. She was seeing Dr. Hal Fulton before he went off to the Army, but now that his two-year stint is over, he’s back in town, and pressing Diane to marry him. He’s not practicing medicine, however, as his father, chief of staff Dr. Roger Fulton, would have it; he’s starring in a play for the local theater group. He has never loved medicine, but only went into it because his father bribed him with a trust fund if he went to medical school. So he is not the only one in this book who has a decision to make.

Diane’s choice is between Hal and the hot young playwright, Larry Ashley, who wrote the vehicle that Hal is starring in. Diane, given a copy to read, ends up staying up past midnight to finish it, even though she had performed a very demanding surgery that morning, removing 15 pounds of tumor from a woman’s abdomen. “Oh, what a thrill I get out of removing a nice big tumor!” she says.

Diane’s aunt, Dr. Sally, is a general practitioner in the country. She was the one who inspired Diane to become a doctor, and when Sally gets into a car accident, Diane takes two weeks off from her residency and subs for Dr. Sally. While she’s there, she diagnoses a severe headache in a 17-year-old girl as a brain tumor, thereby saving the girl’s life. And guess what—this girl turns out to be Larry Ashley’s half-sister! Diane goes on a cruise down the Georgia coast with Hal and some friends to decide whether she should accept Hal’s renewed proposal of marriage, and beyond that, there’s really not much more to say about the plot.

The most interesting part of the book is its take on women in medicine. Aunt Sally tells Diane she never married because “In my younger days I was wedded to my work. I felt a woman doctor couldn’t do justice to her profession and a family.” Diane responds that she is planning to wait to marry until after she has finished her training. “The pressures won’t be any less then, Diane, but really greater,” Sally answers. “I never felt that a husband would be satisfied with the attention I could give him after doing my duty by my patients. But conditions have changed. Homes are run on a different basis. With so many modern gadgets a home can be run with a minimum of help. With a good housekeeper and someone to look after the children, it can be done—is being done—by many women doctors.”

I find it interesting that a book written in 1961 seems to think that a woman doctor is a fairly everyday and accepted creature (there are other, insignificant characters in the book who are also women doctors). This is not the impression I have gotten from other VNRNs, which at times barely even accept women in the role of nurses; certainly most give the idea that a nurse who marries must quit her job. I also find the idea at odds with my idea of what the times were actually like for women professionals at that time. Maybe I’m wrong about this, but I’ve had the belief that women have not been accepted in medicine until fairly recently, and this book is almost 50 years old.

Of course, the book does have to suggest that a woman isn’t complete unless she is married: “I’m convinced any woman misses something very great in life when she doesn’t marry,” Aunt Sally tells Diane. “I’ve often wondered if I wouldn’t be a better doctor if I’d been a wife and mother too.” Interestingly, however, the book also takes the point of view that a male doctor who devotes his entire life to his career is also missing out. Speaking of Dr. Roger Fulton, “one of the South’s finest surgeons,” one character says, “His wife’s settled into the dutiful position of being available when he has a few moments to see her. His preoccupation with work has never left him time to be a pal to his son. … He would be a happier and greater man if he’d taken a little more time out for his family.”

For its actual story line, the book is perfunctory and nothing special. It’s certainly not a chore to get through this book, as the writing does not make one cringe. And it does spark some interesting lines of thought, which might make it worth reading. So if that’s enough for you, then by all means, have at it.