Hospital on Wheels

By Anne Lorraine, ©1956

Susan had loved Ricky Sharp all her life, with the passionate devotion of someone who had too much love to give. On the night their engagement was announced, Ricky was dangerously injured in a car accident—while eloping with Susan’s best friend. In her anguish Susan turned to her work. But could even the exciting new Hospital on Wheels, with the brilliant but temperamental Dr. Stephen Brand, make her forget losing Ricky?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“Once she was married, her life would consist of loving and looking after Ricky.” 

“Never pause at doors, my dear child. Every time you come to a new door in your life open it boldly and walk in, no matter what you dread to find on the other side.”

REVIEW:
Susan Mance is a lucky orphan, in that after the demise of her parents, she was taken in by a family who had known her all her life and raised with love and compassion. The family also had a daughter, Bette Jonson, and much is made early on about how fabulous Bette is. Bette is “pert, vivacious,” “a breaker of hearts,” and everyone is “lost in admiration of her beauty and charm.” “Bette was everything Susan was not—cherished, adored, lovely, witty and determined.” She’s also willful and spoiled, with every boy wrapped around her finger, and one adoring worshipper in Susan, who expresses her adoration of Bette by following her to nursing school and acting as Bette’s live-in “friend, sister, nurse and slave,” doing all the cooking and cleaning. To be fair, Bette seems to love and appreciate Susan also, and the pair are known as best friends at nursing school. 

Susan eventually manages to land her childhood crush, Ricky Sharp, who has become a doctor (the inspiration behind her and Bette’s desire to go to nursing school). He’s proposed to her, but the night of their engagement party, it’s pretty clear that something is afoot, as Bette acts nervous and Ricky acts guilty, and even the hospital matron is telling Susan to open her eyes. Before the party, however, she works a shift with Dr. Stephen Brand, who is a strict, unfriendly, cold man, and while in clinic she tells him about a patient who can’t make it to prenatal visits because she doesn’t have transportation and no one to mind the other kids. She offhandedly suggests that in these cases it would be best to “take the hospital to them,” and this sparks a fire in Dr. Brand.

But neither Ricky nor Bette turns up for the engagement party, and as she arrives home at her apartment, she gets news that the pair have been in a car crash, and Ricky is paralyzed. Rushing to grab a coat, she finds a note on her pillow from Bette, saying that she and Ricky are eloping! What a shock! So when she tells everyone she is not going to marry Ricky, everyone thinks she’s dumped him because he’s crippled.

Susan also drops Bette like first-period French, and Bette goes to pieces, quits nursing, and moves back home with her parents to care for her mother, who is conveniently ill. Susan visits Ricky from time to time, but the visits are cold and strained, and it’s not clear why she goes—before long, Ricky refuses to see her, so clearly he doesn’t get it either. But the whole story appears to be more than we know—not that we’ll ever find it out, at this rate, because absolutely no one in this book ever has an honest conversation with anyone else. Unfortunately, what this means is that there will be 100 more pages of this silly book that could have been avoided.

Susan “had never been one to profess to having a ‘call’ for nursing,” but we’re also to understand that despite her disinterest in nursing, she is also pretty good at it. But after the accident she needs a change, so when Dr. Brand comes to her with a full-blown plan to start a clinic in a bus, she immediately enlists. It isn’t long before she’s finding that Dr. Brand doesn’t deserve his mean old reputation: rather, he's “charming and attractive,” “a most delightful companion,” and even “kind”! Whenever she’s with him she gets a warm glow, basking in their “mutual understanding,” and the best days of the week are when he travels out with her. He repeatedly suggests they add another nurse, as much as he says he would hate to complicate their pure and easy relationship, and she flat-out refuses every time, even though it means she’s working most hours of most days. On one drive home after a long day, when she is nearly asleep, he kisses her, and then she can’t sleep; “praying only that the man at her side might not hear the excited beating of her heart, nor know that her face was burning hotly from his kiss.” 

At the same time, it’s not clear how she feels about Ricky. “Could she go back to that time when she had not loved him?” she asks herself. She demonstrates little affection or even unhappiness when she sees him, and we have no insight as to what drives her to visit. Painfully, she also can’t decide how she feels about Stephen, her vital signs notwithstanding as evidence. She’s “immersed in these wearisome questions” about what the kiss means, and does he love her, and could she ever come to love him in return? If they are wearisome to her, they are triply so to us, and they go on and on, round and round in circles, arriving nowhere.

Eventually Bette’s mother takes a turn for the worse and Susan is summoned to see her. Now we are presented with a home scene completely opposite to how Susan initially drew it for us. Bette, says Mom Jonson, “always needed you, Susie—always. You had so much that she could never have.” We hear that Bette “was so miserably jealous” of Susan. “She always had to watch you stealing her thunder,” Dr. Brand says, and Bette tells Susan that her mother is better, all owing to Susan’s visit: “A little of Susan is worth a whole lot of Bette.” More reality adjustment comes when Susan decides that Dr. Brand is going to propose to her at a party he’s hosting. The idea gives her “flushed cheeks and bright eyes,” but as soon as she gets home, she decides “grimly” that she will accept Stephen’s proposal: “What did it matter if she could never love him as she had once hoped to love the man she married?” Suddenly her relationship with Stephen could never be more than “firm friendship,” that it could never have “the mad rapture she had experienced with Ricky.” What?

When Stephen does propose, Susan “suddenly felt cold and afraid,” though it mostly appears that she’s upset that he didn’t gush about his unrelenting love for her in the process, but she agrees “quietly.” Just then Ricky turns up with the news that this famous surgeon from America is going to perform a risky operation on him—the only other patient with this condition that he’d operated on died—but there’s a remote chance that he’ll walk again if it succeeds! Alone for a minute, Susan and Ricky realize they’re still very much in love, and Susan insists he have the surgery, which somehow proves that she loves him: “Nobody but a woman deeply in love could have dared to give such advice to the man she loved.” 

Back at the party, Bette pipes up that Susan will never love Stephen, because “she’s the type who gives her heart once and for all. Her heart happens to belong to Ricky—to Ricky, do you understand?” Unleashed, she tells Susan that she had intended to persuade Ricky to elope with her and had left the note, but Ricky would not be persuaded—“he loves you, and has never loved anybody else, nor ever will”—so Bette had grabbed the steering wheel and crashed the car. 

Then Bette tells Susan, “Your whole life has been a constant demand for love, love, and more love—and because you need love so much, you attract it—my mother and father frantically trying to make up to you for your loss, eternally dinning it on me that ‘we must think of poor little Susan, darling’ I almost hated you, Susan, because you demanded so much from us! And then you had to have Ricky.” Following this revelation, Ricky and Susan quickly put things to rights between them, and Susan has an eye-opening realization that it’s true, “I have demanded love, all my life,” which somehow “hurt Bette—the way I took the love of her parents as my right, the way I accepted her love and generosity as due me, and then the way I demanded that you should remain true to me.” It’s a baffling position—doesn’t every child “demand” the love of the people who raise them, and doesn’t everyone insist that their beloved remain true? Is it a sin to need to be loved? As for feeling that Bette owes Susan love and generosity—after the way Susan has been “friend, sister, nurse and slave,” is that terribly surprising?

The maddening way this book completely turns 180 degrees on so many things, and how it willfully keeps half the story away from the reader for most of the book, means we wait and wait for the big reveal that makes utterly no sense; Susan ends up looking like an inconsistent, self-absorbed moron. Bette and Dr. Brand turn out to be the most interesting characters, and even he takes a turn in the end when Bette tells him that he doesn’t love Susan either, when he’s been as swoony in appearance as she’s been all along. Not much of this book makes sense, and with everyone acting so inconsistently and frankly stupidly, it’s really hard to care about them.

A Challenge to Nurse Honor

By Pauline Ash, ©1965

A lot of people though Jeziah Selby had been unfair to his four daughters when he left them his fortune only on condition that they first worked for two years in the hospital that had meant  so much to him. Only the eldest girl, Honor, was happy to do as he wished—but were the others necessarily selfish to rebel?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“She scuttled away, remembered she wasn’t supposed to run unless it was fire or haemorrhage, and waited till she got round a corner before she smartened her pace.”

REVIEW:

This Harlequin romance about four sisters named, I am reluctant to tell you, Faith, Hope, Charity and Honor Selby, seemed similar to other Harlequin books I’ve read, including Nurse Willow’s Ward, also about four sisters, and Reluctant Nurse, about a woman who is forced into nursing by a domineering father. Here we follow Honor, who is the one daughter who actually wanted to be a nurse, and her three sisters, who with far less enthusiasm do office work around the hospital. The other three all had budding careers as a musician, model and actress, but had been forced to put them aside when dear old dad died and stipulated that if any of his children were to inherit, all of them had to work for two years in the hospital. If any one of them should cut and run, no one will inherit. You may not be shocked to hear that the non-nurse sisters are not very happy about this. “I just can’t begin to understand what possessed Daddy to make that horrible will,” Charity moans to Honor. Bizarrely, Honor is the only one of the set who does not seem to feel that her father has done anything horrible. “You know very well what Daddy wanted—a son, to carry on the family tradition,” she answers Charity, as if this is going to either excuse Dad’s behavior or make Charity feel that Dad actually did care about her. “He thought the theater was a useless way to spend your life,” she adds, twisting the knife while she has the chance. She should have been a surgeon instead of a nurse.

She persists in torturing her other sisters as well; when Faith says that when the two years are up she is going to resume her music training in Vienna or Milan, Honor tells her, “Daddy didn’t want that sort of life for you.” Again and again we witness Honor’s cruel inability to empathize with her sisters or acknowledge that her father had not treated her sisters well. “He was being very wise,” she decides. “My sisters knew very well how he felt about their chosen careers. He was only enforcing by death what he hadn’t had time to enforce in life. Daddy was fair, he never asked too much of anybody.”

When she’s not acting “all stiff and starchy like the older staff,” Honor is fighting with her boyfriend Lucien Lorimer, a rich cad with whom she has little in common, but who proposes nonetheless. It won’t take a Sherlock Holmes to deduce that Lucien actually had a thing with Honor’s sister Faith at one point, and the pair are still fond of each other, but Honor is as dumb about them as she is about her father. For her part, she is nursing a crush on surgeon Elliott “Jake” Falkland, who clearly is fond of her, too. Honor, naturally, is unable to see his affection for her; even after Jake tells her that he’s not interested in other nurses’ troubles, only hers, she decides that he “had given no great indication that he wanted to be specially friendly with her.” So the pair stumbles through much of the book with stupid misunderstandings because neither can see the obvious, much less speak it. The problem with this device is that it becomes increasingly maddening as the book goes on. “The fact that he had taken her in his arms and kissed her didn’t really mean that he loved her,” we hear two-thirds of the way through, and we’re ready to take a number behind all of Honor’s sisters and give her a good smack.

Eventually the tragedy that Charity foretold—“No good will come of keeping any of us here. One day something awful will happen, because we’re honestly no good at the job, and then you’ll be sorry, Honor!”—comes to pass. Faith and Lucien, out for a boat ride with a few drinks on board, crash, and Faith hits her head and lapses into the inevitable coma. The accident brings almost everyone’s feelings out into the open—Lucien and Faith’s, and Hope and the passenger Alan Froy, who happens to be a music talent scout and whom Hope had met a year earlier. It also cracks the ice encasing Honor’s heart, at least as far as her sisters are concerned, and she goes to the attorneys to see if there is a way out of the will—but the attorney hints that dad had yet another trick up his sleeve. But before she can get the whole story from the attorney, she witnesses a man being stabbed in an alley, is conked on the head by the perps, and lapses into a coma of her own. Waking from it, she’s back to her old ways, needling Hope when Hope reveals that she’s leaving the hospital to go to Italy to nurse Alan back to health and, incidentally, marry him. “It will keep, won’t it?” Honor says, suggesting her sister postpone her wedding. “There’s only another twelve months to carry out Daddy’s wishes, and you did say you’d stay the course.” Honor really, truly, has no right to her name.

While she lies listlessly in the hospital thinking that her relationship with Jake is over while all her sisters have chucked the traces at long last and run off with their various beaux, the attorney shows up and tells her that if the sisters can’t last two years, then they get half their share of the inheritance instead of none, but Honor, who has stuck to it, can keep her full share. Not likely to promote sisterly affection, but half an inheritance is better than none. She rouses with this news to read a letter from Jake saying that he thinks she does not love him so he will leave the hospital, and so she manages to stagger out of her hospital room and scream his name before passing out again at the top of the stairs, but the doctor is nearby and hears her, and she hadn’t actually plummeted down the stairs after all, and everything is quickly put to rights between her and Jake.

Overall this story is fairly sweet and well written, but the problem is that Honor as a heroine is just awful. She is selfish, cold, and unfeeling toward her sisters, blind and stupid about the men in her life, and in the end exhibits little character growth except that she’s finally able to make a (ridiculous) attempt to keep Jake from leaving; surely a phone call would have sufficed? It’s very hard to spend so much time with someone you cannot bring yourself to like, so the challenge here is not for Nurse Honor but for us, the reader, to manage to stand her long enough to finish the book.

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.