Dedication Jones

By Kate Norway
(pseud. Olive Norton), ©1969

Staff Nurse Didi Jones was torn between enthusiasm for her interesting new job and the feeling that she ought to be “settling down” as her fiancé wanted. But would there have been any problem, if she had really cared about him?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“I don’t know how you dare to argue with that woman. She terrifies me. I go all hemiplegic at the sight of her.” 

“The way to a man’s heart isn’t through his stomach anymore. It’s through his twin carburetors or his new putter, old dear. You’re not with it.”

“Depression in a young woman of under twenty-five is either a psychosis or it’s reactive to the boy-friend situation.”

“Incompetent people are always terribly bossy, just to try to prove that they can control things.”

“Gossip can be psychotherapy. So can cigarettes, love affairs, fast driving, a good boo-hoo or a nice cup of tea.”

“You’ve had too much vitamin B. You’re getting aggressive.”

REVIEW:
As we meet “dedicated” nurse Delia Jones (she also goes by Didi, unfortunately), she is working at King Edward VII Memorial Hospital in England and has fallen victim to the classic romance trope in which her fiancé is not an especially charming individual who is always pestering her to quit her job and get married even though she really loves her work. “Geoff didn’t approve of wives who worked. He didn’t understand, I told myself. Teddy’s wasn’t like a shop, or an office. It was a life.” So you know there’s going to be a lot of tedious back-and-forth about that, when the answer is obvious. Her best friend, Rose—a delightful, flirtatious, sassy type—tells her, “If you marry him, dear girl, you’ll just be a—a chattel.” And worst of all, for you literary folks, “Geoff didn’t approve of Muriel Spark. He had found Miss Brodie unsavoury.” Just leave the bum! 

In the meantime Didi has started working in the Isolation Ward, which for some reason includes a lot of psychiatry cases. This means she is seeing a lot of a certain Dr. Dwyryd Ffestin-Jones (he’s Welsh). He’s kind, firm, but a little distant—in short, the quintessential British nurse novel love interest.

Next comes trope #3, in which Didi has mailed her engagement ring back to Geoff, but he’s been injured and may never walk again, so it’s not clear if she feels free to keep walking out the door. Then suddenly Dr. F-J is not speaking to Didi, and she’s not sure what has happened—so naturally she comes down with flu and is in a coma for a week, but fails to recover because she’s so upset about Dr. F-J’s behavior that she is shipped home to recover for a month or two. Only a chat with a psychiatrist—just not that psychiatrist—helps her get caught up with hospital gossip and figure out what the problem is. She promptly takes action and saves her own day …

Overall the book is very formulaic, but it has pleasant characters—again, per usual, the best are the strong, independent heroine and her feisty roommate, as well as a few other nurses who come across well, while the men are mostly limpid and uninteresting, including Dr. F-J, I’m sorry to report. There is a subtle humor throughout, such as when Didi tells a friend, “If I don’t spill to some neutral observer, I shall burst,” and he replies, “And I’m no surgeon, so we can’t have that. Spill away.” Once again Olive Norton, here writing as Kate Norway, lives up to her solid reputation as a gem of an author, and I can again recommend the tenth book I have read by this excellent writer, and hope that she’s written a lot more nurse romance novels that I can look forward to.

Nurse Rivers’ Secret

By Anne Durham, ©1965
Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Everyone at Ripplegate General Hospital was tremendously excited when the film star Dawn Delaney was admitted as a patient—everyone, that is, except Nurse Nina Rivers, who knew Dawn only too well and dreaded the complications she would inevitably bring with her.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“She’d be a proper corker out of that horrible uniform.” 

“No one looks at a nurse unless she’s doing something to attract attention.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nina Rivers has made a life for herself apart from her family; she comes from a fairly broken home. Her father died when she was very young, and Mother married Alexander Fitchworth, a very nice man who had been a real father to Nina. Of course, he went and died, and Nina became a sort of Cinderella to her temperamental and beautiful stepsister Alexandra, waiting on her hand and foot. Astonishingly, when Mother and Alexandra had decided to move to America, Nina elected to remain in the U.K. to become a nurse, and neither of them has ever forgiven Nina for “abandoning” them and what would have been a life of unappreciated drudgery.

Imagine poor Nina’s surprise when her sister is brought in to her hospital as a pampered private patient—under the name Dawn Delaney, as she is now known, as she is a rising movie star and is making a film in a castle nearby; Dawn had fallen through a rickety balcony when she had been up there outside of working hours with a film mogul who could do things for her career. Nina is immediately sacrificed at Dawn’s altar by none other than Mommie Dearest. Not a hug or word of affection passes from Mommie’s lips after years apart from her first daughter before she is exhorting Nina not to tell anyone of the relationship. “You’ve always said you didn’t care for that sort of life. This is what you prefer, and as soon as Alex has recovered, she will go right out of your life again, and not trouble you,” she says, blaming the victim. “You must come and have tea with us one day,” she adds, finishing the job with a knife to the heart.

But Dawn/Alex is a spoiled brat, always on the call light and sobbing in self-pity, and the only one who can soothe her is Nurse Rivers, who is constantly pressed into duty to pat the limpid hand of her sister. Dawn is also one of those ladies who “always found the men belonging to other girls much more acceptable to her than other men. She didn’t mean any harm; she just couldn’t help it.” Yeah, right. And of course the first man she notices is Dr. Antony Alsford, who is all but engaged to Nina—if only they can settle the thorny issue of whether she will quit working when they get married. “I just want a career of my own,” she tells him repeatedly, but he is having none of it. “He didn’t like his girl-friend to be the one with ideas, the one to want to make plans. He would want a yes-woman, Nina felt.” It’s clear why she wants to marry him and why she is heart-broken when he becomes starry-eyed over the dewy, rose-colored Dawn—and breaks off their engagement with a story about how he is doing her a huge favor by ending it. “I’m standing in your way,” he generously explains. He has no idea how right he is, and unfortunately neither does Nina.

Because there’s nice old Dr. Stephen Cornwell to help her over the rough patches, give her a lift into town and buy her tea and pass over his handkerchief. Though he starts out “much as a kindly uncle,” his charm grows naturally on Nina, and he is clearly in love with her—though she, of course, is the last one to figure this out. She does come to understand something her own feelings early on, however—“a rather special feeling towards Dr. Stephen Cromwell, that had begun deep down in her almost imperceptibly, and was now like a glow of warmth on a cold day, stealing gently yet swiftly all over her. A glow that made her want to be with him all the time.” Unfortunately Dawn, recognizing the attraction between the pair, now decides that, having won Antony for her own, she no longer wants that fickle man and has her heart set on winning poor Dr. Cornwell. “She hadn’t really wanted Antony permanently; she had just wanted to feel that she could take his attention away from another girl, and now she was finished with him.” What a sweet girl!

Now Dawn is making herself sick with longing for the good doctor, and Nina feels she has no choice but to exhort Dr. Cornwell to go along with the charade that he loves her in order to help her recover. “Dawn wanted him, and they must consider her, because she was so ill,” she decides. He flat out refuses, however, proving himself to be a man of principles and character. “She’s behaving like a spoilt child. She wants something. She must have it. It doesn’t matter if it’s some pretty toy or a man’s attention, it’s all one to her. And I, for one, will not pander to it,” he tells her, adding, “I think you’ve let Dawn and her mother make a doormat of you for years, and I’m going to personally stop it.”

But Nina is a clever lass, smart enough to figure out another way to get Dawn off Dr. Cornwell’s leg—even if in enacting her plan she risks losing the doctor for good. Complications and misunderstandings ensue, of course … and in the end we have another fairly typical Harlequin story, sweet and slow, with an admirable, strong heroine—and in this instance, we are lucky to have an attractive love interest as well. Some side characters are well-drawn; Nina’s mother in particular was terrifically horrid in a subtle sort of way. If overall this book is not especially sparkling, it’s still well worth an afternoon.

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.

Marry Me Nurse

By Virginia Nielsen, ©1969 

“Funny how when a confirmed bachelor finally decides to get married, he can’t wait to find a minister!” Navy nurse Jo Mellor had to agree with her friend Pixie, but what was even funnier was Jo’s own reaction. She was in love with Lt. Jack Hurley, wasn’t she? She wanted to marry the flyer, didn’t she? Then shy couldn’t she set the date? Because it would mean giving up her career, or because—deep down—she was beginning to wonder if Jack was the right man for her after all …

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“There aren’t many men who really listen to a girl. It’s irresistible.” 

“She’s a born chief nurse—all that starch!”

“’I don’t know why he makes me so nervous,’ she wailed, ‘unless it’s that he’s so wonderful!’”

“The doctor is not permitted to yell at his patient, so he yells at his nurse. This is one of the reasons he has a nurse.”

“You never knew a man until you saw him behind the wheel of a car.”

REVIEW:
This book is made more interesting—but also more confusing—by the fact that heroine Lt. Jo Mellor, R.N. is serving in the U.S. Navy. She’s assigned to a remote clinic on Oahu, thirty miles from Waikiki, where there is also an airstrip, and there she meets—and is quickly rushed—by the sexiest man alive, pilot Lt. Jack Hurley. “No man should have a face so startingly beautiful,” she sighs, and three pages later she’s wondering in italics, “Maybe this man is the one?”  She’s not the first nurse to think this, as he’s already dated and ditched her best friend Pixie and her nurse nemesis Lisa. 

In the meantime, she has to put up with grumpy Dr. Henry Taylor, who is stuck in this godforsaken outpost lancing boils and treating rashes—and numerous plane crash victims—instead of performing surgery, his first love. “Brilliant and conceited, totally immersed in medicine,” Dr. Taylor’s “high-handed, hard-boiled manner is infuriating!” And he’s constantly needling Jo because she cares about her patients—but she’s able to get the five-year-old with Legg-Calve-Perthe’s disease to hold still for the X-ray that proves the diagnosis.

If Dr. Taylor is abrupt and snappish, flyboy Jack isn’t winning any points, either. At a picnic on the beach when it is discovered that someone needs to go across the street to the café for cups, Jack refuses the mission, saying, “My plan-of-the-day is to lie around and be waited on by an adoring slave.” I know, it’s difficult to forgive his misuse of hyphens, but referring to his new girlfriend as a slave also merits our disapproval. Then there’s the fact that he’s peeved when she saves a man who’s been bitten in the leg by a shark. “I have a thing about sharks,” he explains later, and Jo is so relieved by his selfish attitude! And when he proposes within a week of meeting Jo, he insists that she quit her job: “No wife of mine is going to nurse anybody but me.” When she reminds him that he does not outrank her, he denies it: “As your husband, I will always rank you. That’s understood.” I don’t understand it, but I’m not Navy.

She’s understandably a bit depressed on duty the next day, and when she tells Dr. Taylor why, he points out the obvious, that marriage to Jack will not work out. “You are as engrossed in nursing as Hurley is in flying,” he says. Then comes the tedious part of the VNRN classic trope, where Jo tries to convince herself that if she really loved Jack, she would be willing to give up her career, comparing herself to her friend: “Pixie would not hesitate a half second before giving up everything to go anywhere on any terms if Dr. Ernie wanted her. If he were as demanding as Jack, Pixie would love it.” Um, sure. Soon the derogatory adjectives start piling up: Jack is “a little arrogant,” telling her what to wear, and “she wondered what insecurity made him want all her attention, every minute of her time. It was a demanding sort of jealousy.”

Then the next trope is trundled onstage: There’s a terrible storm and flood, and Jack crashes his plane on landing, breaking his leg. Dr. Taylor saves the leg but can’t salvage Jack’s career, so now Jo is tied to a man she doesn’t want, because she can’t break up with him now! “He would never know that she did not love him. No love or desire of her own could be strong enough to break the bonds that Jack’s dependence imposed on her.” Does anyone else think she’s kidding herself to an alarming degree?

Of course, she’s rescued at the end—prompted not by her own honesty or self-preservation but by the realization that Lisa loves Jack more than she does, because Lisa brings Jack a putter, symbolizing his recovery, while Jo brings a cribbage board, symbolizing a prolonged stay in the hospital. Now she’s free to phone in a cancellation of her resignation and arrange a tête-à-tête with Dr. Taylor, which, curiously, is played off-stage, after we’ve closed the book—which, at 222 pages, had plenty of room for less important scenes.

The book is full of Navy jargon, never explained—OOD, BOQ, Captain’s mast (apparently some sort of investigation), personnel called Waves—which makes it bumpy for civilians. There’s also a baby mystery about syringe and penicillin pilfering, and the solution to this question is also anticlimactic, a page-filling device that does nothing for the book’s improvement; if anything, it’s mostly confusing why so many people are involved in such a stupid crime. I never appreciate a heroine falling for a man we’ve been set up to dislike and who shows few, if any, redeeming qualities, or why she would continue dating a man who turns out to be an ass. It’s a perfunctory book with little enthusiasm for anything other than the Navy, so unless you are eager for an occasional armchair glimpse of Hawaii or the Navy, there isn’t much to recommend this over-long, yet simultaneously thin, book.

Mollie Sloan Special Nurse

By Millicent Morgan
(pseud. Rudo Globus), ©1962
Cover illustration by Jo Polseno

Mollie Sloan, R.N., was a good nurse, so good in fact that a group of doctors from the hospital where she’d trained used her exclusively on their most difficult cases. She had a nice apartment, money in the bank, friends galore, but something was deeply troubling Mollie. It came to a head when Eric Hart, a young concert pianist at the peak of his career, was admitted to the hospital. His right hand was completely paralyzed, though organically there was nothing that matter with it. Dr. Paul Desmond, his doctor, immediately put Mollie on the case. But in the end it was more than curing Eric so that he might return to his career. For in the process Mollie discovered that she must make one of the most difficult choices in her young life. It involved not only her work, which she loved, but two men. The trouble was that it seemed to her that she was in love with them both!

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The truth of it was that people were more dangerous than bacteria and a cure for ‘people’ was as elusive and far-off as ever.” 

“Next time I see you, I’ll expect a sexy smile. That’s why you women are here.”

“Some day, of course, she would marry, have children, fulfill her role as a woman.”

“None of you smart people have any idea what the nurse really does. There seem to be two schools of thought. One is that a nurse is a drudge, forever emptying bedpans, making beds, giving shots, handing out pills and taking temperatures. The other thinks that all we do is sit in a room with someone like you and play gin rummy. Well, both are wrong. We’re something special. We’re not little doctors and we’re not glorified maids. We’re the extra part of medicine, the ones who give patients something that makes it easier to stand illness, the cold impersonalness of the hospital, the mechanics of treatment.”

“A nurse isn’t supposed to look the way you look now. Fix your hair and straighten up.”

“I’m very proud that you can admit that you’re wrong. Most people try to find excuses to prove that they were right. That’s when I mean by running away. They think it’s easier that way. But it’s the hardest way in the end. If they faced up to things and told themselves the truth, they could easily solve problems. Never run, Mollie. Stick it out, fight it out, demand the truth of yourself and do what the truth demands you do. When you’re older, you’ll learn that somehow you can deal with any problem if you tell yourself the truth and don’t run away.”

“From now on I’m just an unemployed gal waiting for some man to make an honest woman out of me.”

REVIEW:
This book is like a nurse novel heroine’s runner-up boyfriend. He is so handsome, and he makes your heart pound—but in the end he turns out to be arrogant and selfish, and he runs off with the wealthy patient. The philosophical question to ponder here is whether your ultimate disappointment nullifies your initial excitement.

Mollie Sloan is the greatest nurse ever! She explains, “I’ve got a funny kind of auburn hair, I’m five feet two, my eyes are hazel, and I’ve been told that I have a cute figure and gorgeous legs.” She is a private-duty nurse, and has a half-dozen doctors who can’t live without her. “They would tell her that she was the only nurse in all of New York City good enough for this case—oh yes, this was a case for that special something of Mollie’s, Mollie’s Magic Touch.” In her first year as a nurse, “on Grand Rounds, the attendings, the great men, asked her opinion and took it seriously.” Which has happened in real life exactly never.

Here, though, she’s called to care for misunderstood, overwrought, emotionally traumatized musical genus Eric Hart, a brilliant pianist who was raised by an abusive mother and who after a weekend of debauchery following a smash concert at Carnegie Hall develops conversion disorder—psychosomatic paralysis of his right hand. Mollie’s casual boyfriend, Dr. Paul Desmond, is a neurosurgeon who asks her to take on the case, because she is the only nurse in all of New York City good enough for this case, as we’ve already heard.

The patient isn’t told that his problem is psychological. “If we had years and years, we might try psychoanalysis and reveal the truth behind the conflict, but we haven’t time,” Paul says, because if Eric is unable to use his hand for months or years, his brilliant career will be ruined! After chatting him up for a week in the hospital, Mollie is allowed to take Eric out on unethical Saturday night dates, during which he begins to open up to her—and to kiss her. Highly unprofessional! But she is not allowed to come off the case because “Eric has made a transference to her,” a psychological term that goes unexplained but here means a deep connection to a therapist. Paul “was certain that she was the key to Eric’s recovery, the one factor motivationally strong enough to make Eric want to use his hand.”

Meanwhile, we are told repeatedly that Mollie and Dr. Paul are Just Friends. “She and Paul had never gotten past the point of enjoying each other’s company. They were attracted to each other and affectionate as all get out, but the words that changed friendship into a serious romantic feeling had somehow never been spoken.” “Was it possible that she was in love with Paul? Good heavens, no! They had known each other too long. Their friendship was so fine, why ruin it with sentimentality?” “Paul was too totally absorbed in his work and snorted contemptuously at physicians who married too early, giving up crucial years of creative work to support a wife and too many children.” But, surprise, now that Eric is demonstrating a strong interest in Mollie, Paul begins to recognize that his casual attitude about Mollie is a sham. “It was not until Eric had threatened to take her away that he had come to realize that he wanted to marry her.” But is it too late?

When Mollie ultimately manages to cure Paul—by tumbling off a cliff and requiring two equally powerful hands to pull her back to safety—Eric’s feelings for Mollie become more than a little alarming as he demands she stay with him morning and night, even though he no longer needs a nurse. “After all, he owned her now, didn’t he? Hadn’t he saved her life and hadn’t she given him back his right hand?” Unfortunately, no one seems to feel that the admittedly nutty Eric’s behavior is off base.

How does Mollie decide which man she wants? She chats up her old superintendent of nurses and spends a day wandering the hospital where she had worked before leaving to do private duty—and ultimately makes a heartbreaking decision. Though Mollie has many times asserted and demonstrated her devotion to nursing, she decides that “nothing ever really can take the place of a man and children.” “Something else had entered her life, something more important than work.” Numerous nurses tell Mollie that as much as they love their jobs, “if a man ever showed up who could give me the kicks that I get out of my work I’d quit in a minute.” I know that in 1962 this was a prevailing attitude, but this book does not question of that sexist, illogical line that we find in some VNRNs. I do wonder if this book takes that position in part because it was written by a man, who can’t appreciate the prison he is sentencing Mollie to.

The language and intellect in this book is quite sophisticated, reminiscent of a JeanneJudson novel, and it has a similarly complex understanding of Eric’s psychological problems, which gives it a touch more realism than the usual VNRN. But Eric’s alarming stalker-like attitudes pass without comment, and the beliefs about a woman’s place in the world, make this book in some ways even more disappointing because initially it gave me such hope. Is it better to have loved and lost than to have read another dull Arlene Hale story? I think maybe it is, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re still let down in the end.

Recovery Room Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1965 

Successful businessman Stan Livermore delivered his ultimatum to Nurse Jane Kemp: either she abandon her career to become a full-time wife, or they must forget each other. But as a desperately needed nurse, Jane wanted to be a permanent part of her profession. At the same time, she was deeply in love with Stan. It was a hopeless dilemma. Until Arthur Howard, her famous—and very handsome—new patient offered an unexpected solution …

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“I’m not a kid intent upon storming any woman’s lips. Behave.”

“Some friends you have, Jane! Are they born rude, or do they acquire the knack only after long study?” 

“Jane thought that men were certainly a problem. Yet what a dull world it would be if there were no such problems for women to handle.”

“You’ve come to complain. You disapprove of beginning a subcuticular suture by placing a square knot lateral to the incision. Oh, I know, I know!”

“As a woman ages, she must substitute the charm of thoughtfulness for the charm of beauty.”

“Look, darling, if I didn’t feel good, I’d still put on the act just to keep out of your clutches.”

“The careers of all unmarried women should be smashed. An offense to nature.”

“I’m trained to see facts, recite them, do something about them. Others ought to have the same training.”

REVIEW:
Pop the champagne, because this is my 500th VNRN review! I will admit I have been saving this review for a few weeks for this occasion, because there are few better authors to celebrate an occasion with than Bill Neubauer. 

Reading a book by Bill Neubauer is like walking into your best friend’s house. It’s a welcoming, comfortable place where you feel happy and at home, and you know it’s pretty likely are going to have a good time. Such is Recovery Room Nurse, which is about nurse Jane Kemp and her struggles at work and with her boyfriend, Stan Livermore. Stan is a 32-year-old real estate mogul, worth $800,000—a lot of money in 1966, when top doctors didn’t make $40,000 annually—who met Jane when she nursed him through an episode of appendicitis. The problem is that now he wants her to quit her job and be a full-time wife. Jane also has a roommate, Grace Ohlsen, who is a spunky ecologist. According to Grace, Stan insists that “all you must do to make him happy is quit your profession, renounce your individualism, and drudge for him. I continue to think you’d be an idiot to subordinate your life to his.” I really like Grace Ohlsen.

Jane is more torn, though, and struggles with Stan—even breaks up with him at one point—thinking, “Marriage, darn it, couldn’t be a relationship in which one partner had everything his way and the other partner had no individualism or rights or options to speak of!” But, unfortunately, Jane thinks, “Drat the character, she loved him.”

In the interim, she is sent to special a mega-famous TV writer, Arthur Howard, who has a mortal fear of hospitals and is, in a word, a crybaby. He’s due for a hip surgery, and, anticipating a tough recovery, is seeking “a voluptuous blonde nurse who will distract him from pain,” largely because he has a recurring dream in which a jolly, plump nurse chases away a skeleton that is trying to do him in. Unfortunately the supervisor of nurses, Mrs. Dolezal, has decided that he is going to have Jane Kemp, who claims to be neither voluptuous nor pretty (of course, she’s wrong; “the woman was a stunner” “with twinkling blue eyes,” and “her rippling laughter was music,” to name just a few of her charms), but is in fact the best recovery room nurse at Buttrick Hospital (the same site of Pam Green Rehabilitation Nurse and TV Nurse).

The politics comes in, as it does with Bill Neubauer’s books, when we learn that Howard is planning to create a new TV series profiling a hospital, and the administrators are eager to please the man in the hope that he will choose Buttrick as the subject of his show. Mrs. Dolezal wants Jane to be his nurse in order to impress him with her skill, which she, of course, does. But on the day of Howard’s surgery, just as he is waking, Jane is pulled out of his room by a student nurse whose patient is choking to death. Jane quickly saves the man’s life, but when she returns to Howard’s room, the man has completely panicked, convinced that Jane “abandoned” him—and only his own brute courage and strength pulled him through the episode. Outraged at his mistreatment, he calls the newspaper to give them a front-page story, and Jane is put on leave. But she is a calm, skilled, intelligent woman, and we watch her play the silly man like a champ. Author Bill Neubauer really liked women, I think, because his female characters are always strong, insightful, supportive human beings who always help out their friends.

One anecdote he describes, though, does break my heart—in the story we are told about a young boy, a diabetic amputee, moved to another hospital ward to die. Though the remaining boys on the ward are not told of the death, they nonetheless scatter Lincoln logs (remember those?) on the floor, so that the boy’s ghost will slip on them and fall, rendering the creature unable to attack them. Neubauer, who was raised in the St. Giles Home for Cripples on Long Island, may well have experienced just such as scene when he was growing up. He led a remarkable life (see his biography), and his back story makes his gifts as a writer all the more extraordinary.

Anyway, in this book, Jane is an awesome heroine, the kind of woman who, stuck in the ear with a fishhook, pushes it the rest of the way through, cuts off the barb with pliers, and while stanching the flow of blood heads to her hospital’s ED, where she quips to the intern, “You’d better be good; I’d hate to perish of tetanus.” But the problem with this book is that Jane is in love with the jerk. We see little of Stan except when he is giving Jane ultimatums about leaving her job, so though she tells us many times how wonderful he is, I can’t believe it. In the end, her “win”—and you know she would have one—feels like less than half a victory because of the terms she unfortunately agrees to. Neubauer’s writing is otherwise witty, entertaining, and deeply satisfying, and the relationships he builds between women characters are more honorable than those created by many female VNRN authors. If he liked his male characters as much as he likes the women, this would be a better book. Recovery Room Nurse falls slightly short of his best work, but even if the “romance” central to the story isn’t much of one, this book is certainly a gem worth reading.

Shop this title, now republished
by Nurse Novels Publishing, here!

The Hospital World of Susan Wray

By Anne Lorraine ©1965 

Susan became aware that the doctor was watching her. He leaned back in his chair, studying her small office, the bookshelves laden with medical books, and, slightly incongruous amongst such technical matter, a row of brightly covered detective novels. He noted the vase of flowers on the mantel, the only apparent concession to feminine love of decoration. “It’s a good room,” he told her suddenly, unexpectedly. “A good place in which to forget hospital existed. It’s like an oasis, right in the heart of suffering and fear. It reminds me somehow of you, sister. There is something strong, unshakable, a quiet serenity about it, such as you carry with you in your work.” Susan stared at him, her eyes dark with surprise. This—the moody, intractable Dr. More? He had always seemed oblivious of her presence, yet evidently such had not been the case. She felt confused and embarrassed at his words. Thus begins to story of a nurse and doctor whose personal and professional lives are to merge.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“Young folk are afraid of truth, because it hurts, it hurts like the devil. It’s only when you’re old and tired, like me, that you know it’s the only decent thing in the world—is truth. You learn to love it, then, you let it stick into your heart, and you don’t even feel the pain.” 

“‘Want to hear about the abscess now?’ he inquired, and she forced a look of interest into her face.”

“We demand so much from life—we expect to marked off our minds into little water-tight compartments—this much for my work, this much for my love, this much for the world in general—we get hurt and upset when we discover that our minds are not water-tight, any more than are our emotions.”

“So many of you doctors approach the patient in the same way as a butcher would approach a delectable carcass, and with about as much visible feeling!”

REVIEW:
Susan Wray begins her book with two common tropes around her neck: (1) Her fiancé Jimmie Preston is paralyzed from a car crash, and (2) her younger sister Dinah is a flighty, undedicated nurse working under her supervision at a small English country Hospital. Susan herself is an outstanding nurse, with “a bottomless well of human understanding and tolerance,” loved by patiens and nursing students alike, who speaks “quietly,” “serenely,” “imperturbably,” “softly,” “carefully,” “gently,” or “calmly” on every page. She is incomprehensibly devoted to Jimmie, whom she visits without fail for a couple hours every week, when she begs him to marry her, and he refuses. “I wanted to devote my life to him, to work day and night to bring health and strength back to him,” she explains to a patient. “I could make him well.” But Jimmie refuses to marry until he can walk again, per usual. 

Sister Dinah became a nurse only after their parents died and Susan, it seems, forced her to, but she hates it! Then up turns the mysterious Dr. David Wright, exiled to their back-water hospital because of some terrible mistake he’s made. “I she’ll never touch a knife again as long as I live,” declares the once-famous brain surgeon, and one assumes he won’t be ordering anything less than fillet mignon for dinner, less it be too tough for his fork to handle. In his presence, however, Dinah goes to pieces, and David also pales—and it takes a while for their secret to out: They once worked together, and he had a tricky postop patient whom he left in her care—but she had a date and ran down to the nurse’s station to ask if someone to cover for her, and the patient died in the five minutes she was out of the room. The patient’s unattended death was such a scandal that Dr. Wright was sent packing—a ludicrously implausible story, not improved by Dinah’s eventual confession that she’d been asked to monitor the patient, which somehow completely exonerates Dr. Wright and gets him his old job back.

Enter trope #3: We meet Dr. Jonathan More, who is an amazing physician but who is always irritated; Susan calls them “the most cynical, work-absorbed, uninteresting, dull man.” Despite her vows to have as little to do with him as possible, you will not be shocked to discover the cold automaton is soon feverishly clasping her hands and declaring in a hoarse whisper, “It’s you I love, understand?” But after their passionate embrace in the garden, he reveals he is married! Who will Susan and up with in the end?

In the interim, there is the story of a woman OB, Dr. Teresa Drake, who thinks her husband has fathered an illegitimate child and who agrees to adopt a baby based on the village gossip, bizarrely deciding never to ask her husband if the rumors are true. Along the same vein of never seek out the truth no matter how hard it is pounding on your door, Susan also shuts down poor Dr. More every time he tries to tell her about his wife, who clearly does not live with him. What we have here is a failure to communicate.

We are also given conflicting messages about women’s roles: Dr. Drake tells Susan repeatedly how wrong she was not to have had children. “A woman is never completed, or utterly happy, until she has produced a child her own.” Since Dr. Drake ends up adopting, we can assume that her declarations of how happy she is are untrue, since she did not produce the child in question. For her part, Susan decides that “only by sacrificing her career could she ever prove to Jimmie that she loved him,” and when she has finally settled on a man, she tells him, “If you would prefer me to give up my work—I’ll give it up.” (To his credit, the gentleman in question is shocked, and answers, “Your heart has always been in this work, and I’m willing to share your heart with your work, might dear—more than willing.”

If it’s a mostly pleasant, meandering tour of the relationships in Susan Wray’s life, this book doesn’t offer much that’s new or interesting; rather the opposite, I’m afraid, and it’s therefore mildly annoying to watch the same old story lines play out as predictably as they usually do. If only the plotting were better, Susan Wray’s hospital world would be a place worth spending your time.

 

Dr. Jenny of Timberland

By Isabel Stewart Way, ©1964

In the surgical wing after the operation, young Dr. Mike took Jenny’s hand. “You were wonderful, Jenny. You saved this man’s life. You’re so young—a girl. I couldn’t believe it.” Suddenly he was holding her in his arms, kissing her with a strange ardor. Just as suddenly he let her go. “My tribute,” he said formally, “to a very able doctor.” Lovely, young Jennifer Warden was a skilled and dedicated physician, but this handsome, arrogant man had touched something deeper in her nature—her pride as a woman!

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Gossip is like a bottle of strong medicine—you’re entirely remiss if you don’t check the label before and after giving.” 

“Let’s get away from here fast—before these hospital smells seep in and anesthetize us both!”

“Don’t you laugh, Missy! It ain’t no joke for a man to find himself without his pants! Especially around females!”

“What a loo-loo of a redhead! Any chance to make out with her?”

REVIEW:
Dr. Jennifer Warden was all set to step into a cushy job as a general practitioner when she got the call from an old friend to help out at the High Valley Lumber Corporation’s mountain hospital, caring for the employees and their families at a clinic that “runs the usual gamut of cases from obstetrics to brain surgery.” Doesn’t sound like work for a GP, but Dr. Jenny is “smart at surgery,” so she’s tapped for the job. She’s not wild about it, but the chief suggests that she’s a little too, well, flirtatious, and tells her, “You need to find yourself, Jenny. You’ve got to find some way to bring the woman and the physician into accord within you, Jenny.” She accepts the assignment, though, because she realizes that “when a good-looking guy looked at her with admiration, she felt a definite response. In fact, she liked to feel this response, liked to feel the warmth spreading through her veins, liked the tingling excitement that a man’s kiss could give.” I’m not sure how working in a logging camp is going to fix that, or if that’s even a problem. 

Not surprisingly, the plan to “integrate” her two selves gets off to a poor start when she meets company general manager and hot guy Nathan MacLaren, who immediately decides, “As soon as I can arrange the company affairs, I’m going to get sick—and have a nice long stay at our camp hospital!” He asks her to dinner and she agrees, then chastises herself: “She was banishing herself to the lumber-camp hospital just to get well rid of this frivolous, unprofessional attitude toward men!” But she decides to worry about that tomorrow, and sets off for some dinner and dancing and smooching.

Up at the hospital, though, there’s this big oaf, Dr. Mike Raditche, who scowls a lot and seems to regard women doctors rather poorly. So even before chapter two, we’re prepared for the old trope about falling for the guy you hate. And on day one, when a tree falls on Benjy Hart, Jenny acts as lead surgeon for a middle lobectomy, a surgery very nicely described, in which Mike assists—and then afterward confesses, “I was appalled at first, when Dr. Luke said you’d do it—you’re so young, somehow, and a girl! But well, it was thrilling to watch you, and a privilege to assist.” Thanks, Mike. He crowns the backhanded compliment with another one, grabbing her and kissing her, “vehemently, with fierce ardor,” and then calls it a “tribute.” Do we think he kisses Dr. Luke after an appendectomy?

She’s on her way home the next day when one nurse’s boyfriend, logger Gig, offers to drive her home but takes her to a mountaintop and kisses her without asking. She isn’t so pleased about that and jumps in his jeep and drives herself home, leaving him to walk. But in her anger—and, of course, “peculiar attraction” for Gig—she forgets about her postop patient Benjy, who’s been running a temp, because she had been “sunk in her own female ramifications of emotion!” Whatever that means. Mike and Luke have patched up the patient, and Jenny goes to the hospital to confess all, even her attraction for Gig, which seems a bit excessive. They forgive her—but Gig tells everyone in camp that Jenny was chasing him, and that Benjy almost died due to her neglect, and now everyone else is quite cool to her.

Benjy’s wife arrives in the hospital to have a baby but refuses to let Jenny see her, even though Jenny is the only doctor available, and the nurses keep mum about the patient’s incipient delivery until it’s essentially showing its little head and are forced to alert Jenny to the situation. It’s a tough delivery and the baby almost dies, but Jenny brings it around with mouth-to-mouth rescuscitation. Later Mike chews out the nurses, and Jenny feels all warm inside to have “a man championing a woman’s honor,” but then goes all frosty when he tells her that she’s a “damned good doctor! You’ve got the right to practice your profession without these personal things coming between you and your work!” Because he’s thinking of her as a doctor, not a woman. Grrrr!

The two become close partners, but it peeves her that he seems to think of her only as a friend. “This was, of course, what Dr. Devers had prescribed for her—removal to a climate where men wouldn’t notice her, except as a member of her sacred profession. But it certainly was a bland tasteless medicine.” Fortunately Nathan shows up, takes her to dinner, and proposes, but if she wants to say yes to him, she has to say goodbye to medicine. “You were created to be a woman, Jennifer, and not a sexless professional! You’re made to be a wife, a mother, the center of a home,” he tells her. “She smiled at him, feeling protected and desirable and feminine—and she liked it.” But she cuts short their date so she can bone up on a surgery she’s doing with Mike the next day. Still, she’s mad at both men—Mike who doesn’t seem interested in her as a woman, and Nathan who wants her to give up her profession. Who will she choose?

The problem with this book is that is main premise—woman vs. professional—is completely weak and illogical, not to mention sexist. It’s not clear how Jenny is supposed to “integrate” both aspects of her personality, unless it means that she’s supposed to fall in love, but she’s not supposed to like going out with or kissing men, because that would make her a “flirt.” Interestingly, though, there is a quick reference to the fact that Mike, completely immersed in his career, has sacrificed his own heart; “If a man is ever to be a good doctor, he has to go through that phase, that wholehearted absorption in his work. Of course, Mike has been in that phase for a long time,” notes Dr. Luke with dismay. Jenny is miseducated by the times—she constantly blames herself for accepting a ride home from Gig the day he assaults her, and seems sadly bought into the belief that if she has a home life (“is a woman”) then she must sacrifice her professional life, to an even greater extent that women must continue to do so even today. But she is generally a strong character who regularly stands up for herself and demonstrates a lot of confidence, and skill, in her work. Another plus is that we get to observe a lot of medicine in this book, even a couple surgeries in detail. In the end this book has enough decent features to make it worth reading, even if the main trope is stale and stupid.

Doctor Chris

by Elizabeth Seifert, © 1946

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

GRADE: B+

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The White Jacket

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

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

GRADE: A-

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

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

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

“Nothing worthwhile ever is simple.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Junior Pro

By Kate Norway (pseud. Olive Norton), ©1959

Before Lindsay Wood took up at nursing, she had been warned that it was hard work. What she hadn’t heard much about was the difficulty of steering one’s personal course. She did find someone to whom she felt she could turn for advice--but he was the resident medical officer, far out of the sphere of a lowly probationer. And she couldn’t quite understand his attitude, sometimes helpful, sometimes very much the reverse. How she coped with all her perplexities is told in a lively story with an authentic hospital atmosphere.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:
“I wished, while I was about it, that Sister Tutor had taught us a little less about finding our way around the buildings, and a little more about finding it round human situations. It seemed to me that nurses needed a good deal of practice in dealing with people, and I knew I didn’t have it.”

“I could eat you, darling, only I haven’t time.”

“It’s a good sign to be a little scared. Bad nurses never worry—they don’t know how.”

REVIEW:
How lucky for me that after coming out of the first F-grade nurse novel I’ve ever read (if you must be reminded: Jolie Benoit, R.N.), I pick up such an incredible gem as Junior Pro. This book has all the hallmarks of a true great: Lots of girlfriends, witty writing that sparkles on every page, a feisty heroine, and—a rare treat—one of the best endings I’ve ever encountered. Told in the first person, the sixth such VNRN I’ve read (but the third by Olive Norton; it seems to be a favorite trick of hers), here we meet Lindsay Wood, who is just entering her first year of training to be a nurse, making her what they call in this English hospital a “junior pro.” On the eve that the “lambs” are finishing their didactic months and being sent to the wards, though, there’s a ball. Like most VNRN hospital balls, this one is momentous, here because only one man asks her to dance. “When we did get on the floor we found ourselves in the middle of a Paul Jones [a dance in which you change partners], and I lost him after about four strides. He was just tall enough to be comfortable to dance with, and I was annoyed. Nobody came to claim me, and I went back behind my pillar.” He turns up later, though, apologetic, and takes her for a drive. When he finds out she is just a brand-new student, instead of mussing her lipstick, he starts the car. “Home, Madam?” he asks, and she replies, “Home, James,” and when they arrive at the nurses’ home, “he bent his head and kissed my hand very gently, and gave it back to me as though it were something extremely fragile and very precious, instead of just thing I used to hold a tennis racquet with.”

Like many people in their first days on a new job, Lindsay lands on the wards with a splat: There is almost nothing she does right, to such an extent that her first moment of triumph is remembering to take the stairs instead of using the elevator, which is forbidden to first-years. The worst of her crimes, though, is when her chauffeur turns up on the ward dressed as the R.M.O.—that’s resident medical officer, or chief of medicine in the UK. “Good morning, James,” she says without thinking, and it turns out that it is a most serious taboo to speak to a senior medical officer when you’re only a nursing student, made even more scandalous by the fact that Dr. Findon’s first name is indeed James. But he seems to forgive her, because when it turns out that she has scored top marks in several subjects and just barely loses out on a prize given to the top student, he gives her one: a silver pin shaped like Aladdin’s—or Florence Nightingale’s—lamp, engraved “Findon prize—Nurse L. Wood.”

Over the ensuing pages we follow not exactly the most original plot line, but still a very enjoyable one as Lindsay flounders less as the days pass, tangles with Dr. Findon, goes home to visit her family on their farm in Wales, and wallows heavily in a mistake of a relationship with Dr. Jack Beresford, an incorrigible flirt who has claimed the heart of her best friend Catherine, complicating matters. But she really does like kissing Jack! Which makes her agree when he vaguely suggests that they marry, though she comes to her senses a few pages later, thinking it would be better to have Catherine than Jack—but then, dang it, he kisses her again, and she loses her head once more. And again, the next morning, when Jack comes around to plan the wedding, she insists—as she has done throughout the book—that she is going to finish her training and get her nursing degree, which will take three more years. Hearing this news, Jack “sulked.” When Catherine pins Lindsay down later on, Lindsay insists it’s over: “He made it clear, then, that he wouldn’t hear of my finishing my training before I settled down. That changed the whole thing. Because nothing and nobody is going to stop me from getting State Registered. If he isn’t satisfied with that, then it’s no go. And he isn’t.” You go, girl!

Lindsay is a heroine we can adore because she is not perfect, but she honestly works very hard and she has a good heart. She is forced to give up her beloved Findon prize pin when a misunderstanding causes her to be suspected of stealing a brooch that a patient has given her, and when months later the nursing matron says she has earned it back, Lindsay disagrees: “James still doesn’t think I come up to some standard of his own,” she decides to herself. “So I can’t wear his badge because it would burn a resentful hole in my apron. I know whether I’m ready to have it or not, better than anyone. And I’m not.” Toward the end there is the usual catastrophe when the hospital’s old smokestack falls in a storm, landing on an ambulance, and Lindsay, who is on the admitting desk in the ED with Dr. Findon, crawls through the broken window in the ambulance door and gives the trapped patient inside a hypodermic of morphine, talked through the procedure by Dr. Findon—and later she asks to be marked off for having given an injection, the spunky lass! When she is on night duty, she uses the quiet hours to study her butt off, because she is deeply passionate about medicine, much more so than surgery: “The way I saw it, medicine was so much more complicated and important than merely tailoring people’s insides neatly. Medicine took skill, and brains, and patience, and selflessness.” 

The writing here is not so much laugh-out-loud funny but just constantly and quietly sparkling: “I thought our off-duty time was a mad scheme to let us relax,” Lindsay says to a chum who wants to use her time to study; “I spend my life in here, mopping up Sister Badger’s casualties. Better women then you have wept upon this manly bosom, I can assure you,” Jack tells Lindsay after he finds her crying in the linen closet on a particularly bad day; “I expected to pass out, and I didn’t. There was too much competition,” Lindsay says of her first day in the OR, in which the surgeon faints; “Thanks for mopping the fevered brow,” Lindsay says to a friend when she’s recovering from the chimney crash. The ending is a true, rare prize in VNRN literature, in which Dr. Findon tells Lindsay that one of her most attractive qualities for him is her dedication to nursing. He gives her a Gloria Steinem–worthy speech about her rights to be “a person in your own right,” and agrees to wait for her to finish her three years of training before they marry (though in retrospect it’s not clear why they can’t marry while she’s a student). I dropped bona fide tears at multiple points through this book, the ending most of all. This book is not to be missed; if Lindsay Wood is only a junior pro, author Olive Norton is a pro of the most senior sort, and if her many other nurse heroines are even half as perfect as Lindsay, I look forward to meeting them.

Jane Arden, Student Nurse

Book 1 of 7

By Kathleen Harris, ©1955

Jane Arden, student nurse, had heard a lot about Dr. Robin Crandall, but it wasn’t until a crisis arose and she was sent to assist in “Emergency” that she came face to face with the handsome young doctor—and in her first test as a nurse, and a woman, began to wonder if love and a career are an impossible combination.

GRADE: C

REVIEW:

Jane Arden, age 19, has begun nursing school at the hospital overlooking her small town, Elmwood, Ohio. At book’s open she hasn’t really told her sort-of boyfriend, David Hyatt, 23-year-old boy next door who before leaving to join the Air Force told her—essentially out of the blue—“You’re my gal” in a “blithe manner,” adding that if she looks at any other man he will “turn you over my knee and paddle you, or lock you in a dark closet and keep you there.” Apparently he takes this ownership thing very seriously. 

Eventually she breaks her treachery to him when he’s home on leave—and he tells her that if she wants to be a nurse, she must not love him the way he loves her: “A woman should be satisfied to be with the man she loves—to go where he goes, do what he wants to do.” Remarkably, his face remains unslapped, and even more remarkably for a VNRN, Jane recognizes the absurdity of his opinion. “Why should her being a woman make the difference he spoke of—why shouldn’t a woman choose what she did with her life?” she thinks, but rather than break her relationship with him off immediately, she decides that if he loves her, he will wait the three years for her to finish her training. Unfortunately she never bothers to tell him what she’s decided, so it’s unclear if David is going to play along, even though he does bring her a diamond so small “it almost took a magnifying glass to see.” Not surprisingly, the catty Jane pockets the thing when she’s at work.

So Dr. Robin Crandall, hospital heartthrob, has no idea she’s theoretically engaged when at the New Year’s gala he pulls her out to that den of iniquity, the ballroom verandah, and the two find there are fireworks exploding over Ohio. Oh, wait, that’s just their “very long kiss.”

Jane’s sister Roberta, the beautiful but cold model from New York, arrives home in an epic funk, slams the bedroom door and doesn’t come out for days. The family is too polite to inquire, but after a month of moping Roberta reveals she had inadvertently been involved with a married man whose wife finally showed up sporting a revolver to put her wise. The only thing that raises her spirits is a nasty bout of appendicitis—or, rather, that luscious Dr. Robin Crandall who is managing her care. After her two weeks in the hospital are up, she starts dating Dr. Robin. In the interim, he has pulled the classic yank-her-into-the-linen-closet maneuver to tell Jane that he’s absolutely mad about her, so she too agrees to date him, deciding that she feels “the mature kind of love only a grown woman could feel for a man. She had never felt this way toward David.”

Unfortunately the busybody nurse Millie Brooks sees them slipping disheveled out of the closet and reports Jane to the nursing supervisor, who tells Jane that unless Dr. Crandall vouches for her, she will be kicked out of the program. When she tells him this, he answers that he’d be glad to, except that it might “jeopardize my medical career”—and there’s no reason why they “should both risk our necks.” Furious, Jane breaks off what passes for a romance with him.

Fortunately for the doctor, he never stopped seeing Roberta, so he’s not completely alone—but Roberta, cold but not stupid, quickly figures out that the good doctor has done her sister wrong. Roberta surprisingly feels she owes something to her sister and flexes some muscle to get Robin to do right, at least by Jane—though naturally neither Roberta nor Robin tell her that she’s off the hook; Jane only realizes when the days pass and she isn’t called to the principal’s office. When the penny drops that her nursing career is not over, she’s only relieved “that David would never know that there had been a time when she had not been so certain. She would get out his ring and put it back on her finger. And when she did, she would have that old feeling of security again.” So here we have another VNRN that puts dull affection for the familiar ahead of passion and true love—though she certainly didn’t have the latter with Dr. Robin, either. However, there are seven more books in the Jane Arden series, so hopefully Jane will figure things out before she comes back to roost in Jane Arden’s Home-Coming.