Soul Nurse

By Rose Dana
(pseud. William Daniel Ross), ©1970 

Sally Hughes, R.N., had a nurse’s dream come true at Canton General. Her boss was the brilliant chief surgeon, Dr. Stan Thorne. She was respected for her dedication, talent and poise. And two men loved her—the bitter but handsome Dr. Jim Dawson and Stan himself. But Stan was white. Could Sally, a black girl, even hope to surmount the difficulties their love presented in the small New England town? Perhaps she would find a way … then tragedy struck. Canton’s mayor is mysteriously stabbed, a black person is unjustly accused and Sally faces a desperate choice—one that involves not only her man but the meaning of her life. 

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“It’s fortunate the doctor also happens to be adept with a knife.” 

“You’re not the least female in that respect. Your punctuality constantly amazes me.”

“It was those who clung most precariously to a rung of the status ladder who refused to make a break with the pat order of things.”

“You need a steady hand for that brain tumor today.”

“Isn’t that the goal of most of the people these days? They want drugs to make everything seem rosy from the cradle to the grave. It’s no longer fashionable to try and change things. You just take drugs so you won’t notice them.”

“Like a scalpel frankness should be used only by skilled hands, otherwise it can work great havoc.”

“Interns devour little girls like you. You be careful with them.”

“Don’t be so bitter. You’re much too pretty.”

“Loud talk brings on more loud talk.”

REVIEW:
A nurse romance novel, which necessarily delves into the life of a woman, is always a little problematic when written by a man. A nurse novel about a Black nurse is especially unfortunate when it’s written by a white man, and I’ll admit I am even more wary when the author in question is one I’ve never liked, here William Daniel Ross writing under one of his many pseudonyms, who has earned only a C+ average across 16 reviews. And perhaps not surprisingly, this book is somewhat problematic—yet not nearly as bad as I had feared it would be, so that’s a win. 

Sally Hughes is a Black scrub nurse working at Canton General Hospital in New Hampshire’s “largest seacoast city,” which at the time when this book was written was Portsmouth. (I have to state that I once lived in Portsmouth, so I have some expertise regarding this setting.) Sally works alongside Dr. Stan Thorpe, who lost his wife to breast cancer three years ago, leaving him with a now-15-year-old daughter Karen, with whom Sally is especially close and sees regularly. Stan also has fond feelings for Sally, and repeatedly pleads with her to marry him, but though she “perhaps even loved” Stan, she is constantly talking herself out of a relationship with him entirely on racial grounds. “What would be the community’s reaction? Would it harm his career?” she worries and considers, “There were things she and Dr. Stan Thorpe would never be able to share, points of view, emotional feelings about remembered days long past, pride of race and color.” She seldom gives any thought about whether being with Stan and Karen makes her happy—which obviously it does, as she spends an enormous amount of time with them. “It was useless to pretend that being with Stan Thorpe and Karne didn’t mean anything to her. Probably she gained a great deal more from it than they did. For just a short time she was allowed to feel part of a family unit.”

There’s another man in her orbit, Dr. Jim Dawson. “It was only natural that they should be attracted to each other,” we are told, but it isn’t until 18 pages later that we learn that Jim is Black, which I guess is supposed to be the reason why their attraction is “natural”—in the same way it’s natural for every white woman to be attracted to every white man? Jim is an exceptionally talented doctor who has built up a good practice in this predominantly white community, a fact that is repeated often with a tinge of surprise. Jim is described as the stereotypical angry Black man barely under control: “Sally was fearful for him. She knew better than most of the others that beneath his calm professional exterior and mocking, sometimes bitter humor there was an explosive temper. Although now it was carefully controlled, the day might come when some insignificant incident might be enough to touch it off.”

Well, you can be sure something happens, but it’s not insignificant. First the mayor is stabbed in his own driveway—saved in the OR by Dr. Stan Thorpe and his right-hand gal Sally—but the mayor has a slimy colleague, Sam Grayson, who is intent on promoting the idea that the perpetrator was a Black man from Boston—he even uses the N-word—though the mayor declares he never saw his assailant, and there’s not even any evidence outside of Sam’s say-so that any Boston Blacks were in town that night.

Then it is announced that a new “cut off” to Interstate 95 is planned—and it will be passing directly through Blair Settlement, a neighborhood of 150 families. (The actual number of Black people living in Portsmouth in 1970 was about 116, or about 0.4% of the total population, so the book’s number is wildly unrealistic, as is the idea that Route 95 would need an additional on-ramp in this fairly rural community.) But the impending destruction of the neighborhood sends Jim into a fury. Sally tries to assuage Jim repeatedly that “it may not be as bad as it seems,” because “she knew it was going to take a great deal of patience and tact to save this man she was so fond of from taking a big leap into trouble and destroying his career.”

Jim is having none of it, and repeatedly insults Sally, telling her, “I can do without your well-integrated caution,” and calling her a “turncoat,” a “would-be Delilah” who has “lost her identity.” He’s bringing in a big-time organizer from a Black Power group to speak at a meeting he’s calling to protest the plans, and Sally is afraid the move will end in violence, and that general opposition to the project—currently pretty high, according to hospital gossip—will evaporate. Soon Jim is getting hate calls in his office, and he’s decided to leave the area for a big city. “People here only want me around when they’re too sick to think of anything but their own white skin. Well, I won’t be at their beck and call. I’m leaving,” he announces, forgetting that all doctors are “called” by their patients when they’re ill. He wants Sally to come with him, but she’s not sure: “I’d be afraid of being tainted by your twisted thinking, by your stupid hates. Emotional illness is sometimes like physical sickness—it can be catching,” she tells him.

Not only is Jim just endlessly mean to Sally, he never overtly proposes to her, never speaks of any feeling for her other than disgust at her position, only asking her to “go with me” when he leaves town. Stan, on the other hand, speaks often and freely of his love for Sally. “You’ve made life bearable for me again,” he tells her. “I’d still be lost without you. Any time I lose you I’ll suffer. I’m in love with you. We’re ideally suited. I’ll keep on asking you to marry me until you say yes.” When she tells him, “It would be a nightmare. I’m positive it would,” he answers, “If you’re trying to say we are not suited because of race or color, that’s sheer nonsense. I’m in love with you.”

The big town meeting comes to pass, but Sally does not attend, choosing instead to spend the evening at Stan and Karen’s house. The meeting turns out to be a complete bust when the organizer—himself a racist; he tells Sally, “I’m not sure I know any decent white people”—“started ranting about everything under the sun,” Jim tells Sally. “He rambled and raged so that he left the Blair Settlement crowd bewildered.” In the end Jim had stepped up and explained that he was hoping to send a petition to the governor, but by that time the fiery rhetoric had lost some of the crowd. Ultimately the neighborhood is saved—but only for the most banal of reasons, budget. “They’ve made a lot of other cuts in their highway budget but that’s the main one,” we are told. Sally continues to insist that bigotry “doesn’t represent the feelings of most Canton people,” but Jim can’t believe that and is determined to leave town. He also has lost interest in Sally, it seems: “Jim Dawson had stopped proposing to her some time ago. He’d even suggested she marry Stan.”

There’s a lot to think about with this book. Is Sally’s preferred method of just talking to people the best way to save the neighborhood? She explains to a friendly fellow nurse, a white woman who has pointed out that the Black families would have been financially compensated for their loss, that it’s hard for Black people to buy homes because they might not be welcome or may not be able to afford a different home, and the nurse “looked embarrassed. ‘I see now it’s not a simple problem of selling homes and buying other ones. I didn’t really understand what it was all about,’” she says, showing that white people in town are reasonable, if ignorant of the realities of Black lives.

On the other hand, the other extreme of the Black organizer being too radical for a small-town New Hampshire crowd is too pat and seems like a cop out—one has to ask if it was the author’s racially motivated fear that inspired this plot turn. Dodging a real discussion of Jim and Sally’s preferred tactics (though Sally’s is tacitly endorsed as she wins over her work colleagues and roommates with conversation) is lazy, and the medium path of Martin Luther King’s peaceful marches is never entertained, nor is the obvious outreach to the general public through the press or general meetings or a door-to-door campaign. I did appreciate that in her daily life Sally repeatedly and calmly faces down racism with smart retorts, but in the end, her strength isn’t enough to keep me from feeling that this white male Canadian author demonstrates a clear bias writing about a female Black American and her struggles for racial equality. I saw this when the characters’ attempts at strong advocacy were made such a complete failure, and when the people who actually saved the neighborhood were not its residents but faceless bureaucrats without feeling for the problem or the potentially dehoused locals. Even Sally’s totally bewildering final decision about her love life is suspect, and I have zero hope that she will ultimately be happy by choosing the then-culturally accepted path instead of following her heart and going with the right (white) man. I’m going to suggest, though, that it doesn’t mean this book isn’t worth reading. Overall the writing and characters (aside from reactionary Jim) are good, and it’s always important to be able to spot the flaws in writing and thinking, especially when it comes to prejudice. As bigotry becomes more subtle (granted less so recently), it takes more skill to see it, and this book offers opportunity to hone your skills. 

Society Nurse

By Jane Converse
(pseud. Adela Maritano), ©1975
Cover illustration by Allan Kass 

Love sick. That’s what pretty Nurse Nina Bateman was, though she knew handsome, wealthy, dedicated Doctor Mark Danover was way out of her league. Then Mark asked her to take a private case, caring for a beautiful young heiress, Cindy Calvert, who happened to be Mark’s next-door neighbor. Was he looking for a competent nurse, or, as his manner suggested, was there something more behind Mark’s request? Everything seemed wonderful, until Nina met Cindy and her domineering mother. Nina realized before introductions were over that she couldn’t stand the haughty Mrs. Calvert. And what was worse, Mrs. Calvert made it obvious she thought Mark would make the perfect husband for Cindy! How could Nina compete for her heart’s desire against the ambitious scheming of her lovely young patient’s overpowering mother?

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“I’m surprised at you. I thought that line went out with starched collars and the five-cent cup of coffee.” 

“A man who told you that he loved you should also believe in you.”

“I was furious. Hurt and furious about you letting that creep make a pass at you.”

REVIEW:
Some authors inspire certain feelings the minute you pull one of their books off the shelf. Jeanne Judson inspires a contented smile, Peggy Gaddis an exasperated sigh, and Jane Converse an anticipatory giggle. And when we have her Society Nurse open before us, we will giggle aplenty. Nurse Nina Bateman lives with her unloving mother in a rundown section of Chicago’s North Side, where she works at a clinic for the downtrodden.  There, two glorious afternoons a week, the godlike Dr. Mark Danover, who lives in a different sort of North Shore suburb, comes to work for free at the clinic, but he is not the sort to brag; “He was doing something he wanted to do and saw no reason to be praised for doing it.” So yes, Nina is in love with Dr. Mark, but “there was no encouragement to be found in his warm smiles, his thoughtful gestures, or even from his complimentary remark,” because “he was uniformly pleasant to everyone.” A rare find in a VNRN, a love interest who is genuinely a good man. Sigh … 

One day, though, Nina and Mark get to talking after a long, hard day, when she reveals she is one of the kids from the ’hood, and that she spends most of her evenings home alone with a book. “Nina thrust her chin up in the air. ‘I happen to like good books.’” And I happen to like Nina! Naturally Mark seems to, too, and asks her out to dinner—and then ruins it by saying he wanted to talk to her about a private case he’s hoping she’ll take on because the patient is a 17-year-old girl with diabetes, and Nina is so well-versed in endocrinology. Also, the patient is a very special friend of Mark’s, and his next-door neighbor. Of course she agrees, thinking she’s likely to see him more often—but the case turns out to be more than she expected.

Poor little rich girl Cindy Calvert is the sweetest little naif with a penchant for saying things like, “Oh, wow, Miss Bateman!” Cindy also has a penchant for Dave Tolson, another poor kid who is putting himself through medical school by mowing Dr. Mark’s lawn—how quaint! But Cindy’s mother Faye is one of those classic divas with “dark eyelashes that were too long and too upswept to belong to their present owner,” who “surveyed Nina as though she were examining a somewhat questionable pot roast.” The only reason Nina gets the job is that she is recommended by Dr. Mark, and Faye has her eye on Dr. Mark as the future Mr. Cindy Calvert, though he clearly has nothing but avuncular feelings for the young girl almost half his age.

So in moves Nina, where she has front row seats to witness Faye’s attempts to “keep Cindy in a state of perpetual childhood,” forbidding her to leave the house, exercise, see friends or especially that Dave Tolson, all because of her disease. “Yet, if anyone who lived here was sick, it was the woman who had made a bright, aesthetically lovely, completely lovable girl see herself as a burden—someone to be ashamed of.” Nina spends her days counting the calories in Cindy’s diet, measuring out and delivering insulin shots, testing blood sugar, and trying to instill a spine into sad, brainwashed Cindy, who is gushingly grateful to the mother who is trying to convince her that she’s “a burden, she should be grateful that people cared about her at all. It had taken years of conditioning to make the girl accept this self-effacing state; the results would not be undone in a few short conversations with a newly engaged R.N.” But liberate Cindy is what Nina cannot help but try to do, and spends afternoons giving her pep talks about her rights.

Needless to say, Nina soon tangles with the imperious Faye, who has told the household staff to tell Cindy’s beau Dave that she’s not available when he calls, but Nina has answered the phone and passed it to Cindy. Summoned to Faye’s lair for a scolding, Nina tries to explain that relationships are good for Cindy, but Faye calls out Nina (somewhat rightly) for overstepping what she knows to be the rules in a house where she is only an employee. Nina, bless her, stands up for herself, saying, “I don’t consider myself a member of your household staff, Mrs. Calvert. I have a degree in nursing. I’d like to be respected as a professional.” Unfortunately, the conversation goes south from there, as Faye calls Nina “common, cheap, conniving” and Nina shouts, “You’re the coldest, the cruelest, the most selfish excuse for a human being I’ve ever met!” And guess who is walking through the door at that moment?

Mark is appropriately shocked. “Frankly, I’m astonished. Name calling! It seems so beneath you,” he tells Nina, but to keep Cindy from falling to pieces at losing one person in her life who cares about her, he convinces the shouting women to give it another try. “If I make any radical changes now, Cindy is liable to run off with that absurd thing with the freckles,” acquiesces the gracious Faye. But it isn’t long before the ladies are back at it, as Faye starts preaching the gospel that her young, gold-digging boyfriend, Reverend Ronald Perry, espouses—that you can cure disease with your mind. (The ever-sassy Nina remarks, when he attempts to sell her his snake-oil theories, “You don’t mind if they keep the surgical wards at County open? A ruptured appendix can be such a nuisance to someone who doesn’t know all you do.”) Faye follows this up by insisting that Nina reveal her true colors—that she’s angling to win Mark for herself. Nina has just admitted that she’s in love with Mark when the man himself walks in—what a knack he has for showing up at awkward moments! He asks Nina if it’s true, and good for her, she replies, “That I love you? I’m not ashamed of that. What if I do?”

Of course it turns out that he loves her too, and there’s a lot of smooching then. But true love never sails smooth in a vintage nurse romance novel, and soon the boyfriend Ronald is assaulting Nina just as Faye walks in—obviously taking lessons from Mark about when to make an entrance. Ron, unphased, tries to salvage what woman he can by insisting, “You must have enjoyed that as much as I did,” to which Nina replies, “I haven’t been so thrilled since my dentist told me I’d have to have root canal work.” But Faye runs straight to Mark, who refuses to hear what Nina has to say about what happened, and she is promptly fired by the cold-faced pair.

Then she’s back working at the old clinic when a stricken Dave Tolson turns up, telling Nina that Mark is out of town at a conference and he is sure that Faye has fired the new nurse and embarked Cindy on a faith-healing treatment plan prescribed by Ronald, and he’s certain that Cindy has lapsed into a diabetic coma. Off sprints Nina to the rescue—will she get there in time? And if she manages to save Cindy, can she cure Mark of his stupidity as well?

Of course she can—she’s a smart, strong, spicy Jane Converse heroine. The writing is sprinkled with Jane Converse’s excellent bon mots, and the characters are enjoyable. If Faye Calvert is too easily dismissed as “whacked out” and insane—it would have been less simplistic and condescending to deal with her as what she is, a deeply troubled, insecure woman who would imperil her daughter to try to keep her man, and there are plenty of people like that in the world—that’s the biggest flaw of an otherwise thoroughly enjoyable book.

Arms and the Girl

By Marguerite Mooers Marshall, ©1942

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“The Lord knows we men are an undecorative species. I hope you can stand looking at me across the table.” 

“Beautiful girls like you should do nothing but exist.”

“People get the poetry they deserve.”

“I am going to have a relapse. You don’t take me seriously any longer.”

“There’s nothing so becoming to a pretty girl as a nurse’s uniform.” 

“Facts are so bald and unimaginative. Facts often annoy. If embroidered or flavored, they are easier to take.”

“You can always get killed in a war if you insist, and frequently if you don’t.”

REVIEW:
This book was a surprise to me because I thought I had read all the VNRNs written my Marguerite Mooers Marshall, who is one of my favorite authors. So now there are five (see also Nurse into Woman, Wilderness Nurse, Her Soul to Keep and Nurse with Wings), and if this one is not her best, well, even Marshall’s mediocre books are still miles better than most. 

Here we find Rosemary Alden (yes, descended from those Aldens of Mayflower fame), who is nursing the mother of an old boyfriend. Mrs. Marianne Sibley is a spoiled, demanding, wealthy woman who wants more of a prop than a nurse, and the only thing that keeps Rosemary on the job is that she has been able to spend time with Philip Sibley, Marianne’s 24-year-old son, who is a sweet young man if utterly lacking seriousness, which is what keeps Rosemary from being, well, serious about him. Soon it comes to light that Philip is being called before the draft board—World War II is about to break loose in Europe—and Marianne is planning to tell them she’s destitute (she’d cleverly moved her money out of the markets and into her mattress a year ago), dependent on her son for maintenance, and furthermore that her health is so fragile that she will drop dead of a heart attack if he is drafted. In truth, Marianne wouldn’t drop dead if she were run over by a dump truck, and as Marianne’s meeting with her health team unfolds, all the doctors fall into line—but Rosemary, disgusted, tells them all off and quits on the spot.

From there she marches over to the Red Cross Nursing Committee to enlist in the Army. But before all the paperwork comes through, Philip is on her door telling her he is in love with her and begging her to marry him. He also mentions that his enlistment has been deferred and his mother is now healthy as a horse and has fired her new  nurse and doctor. She likes him a lot, she tells him, “yet it was all no use. He was a boy unwilling to do a man’s work, a boy who wouldn’t go where even she, a girl, was going. Anything else she might forgive—not refusal to pay a debt of honor, the greatest debt man or woman owes, the debt to country.”

So off she goes to war—well, not exactly, she goes to a training camp located near Winchester, Massachusetts! There she spends many long hours dreaming about Philip: “She remembered the tumbled hair, the tie and the hat never quite straight, the flash of even teeth in the wide irregular mouth when he laughed. She remembered his effortless physical power, his way of making friends with dogs and horses and small grimy children, his sheer boyish charm and decency. So much in him that was winning and fine—yet he flinched at the one hard, disagreeable task ever laid on his twenty-four years! With a frowning shrug, she resolved to put the young man out of her mind. And did not.”

Meanwhile, at the camp’s Officers Club—she’s a second lieutenant—she meets the debonair Captain Gerald Lee, who is Rhett Butler reincarnate, even hailing from a plantation in South Carolina. On their first meeting entices her to go on a date with him in Boston, and soon they are spending much free time together, and everyone is wondering when the engraved invitations will be mailed. But “she did not love him—did not, did not! Something in her so stubbornly resisted. And yet why?” Maybe it’s because she knows that on the very next page she’s going to receive a telegram telling her that Philip has joined the Army and is going to be arriving at her camp tomorrow!

When she meets Philip at the camp, he tells her he wants to prove to her that he has what it takes. “I’m willing to wait,” he tells her—which is a first in VNRNs, the man waiting for the woman! But the bad news here is that she’s an officer and he’s just a private, so they are absolutely forbidden to fraternize. Instead they just write letters to each other, and she continues to date Jerry Lee. And goes home to visit her parents in Belltown, which is a stand-in for the New Hampshire town Marshall grew up in (Kingston) and has appeared in all the other Marshall VNRNs I’ve read. But Philip finds out about Jerry and writes that she’s done him wrong by not letting him know there was someone else, and he’s through!

Two pages later Philip is wheeled into the infirmary, delirious from an infection in his leg, and she offers to special him for 24 hours a day until he is out of danger. So now they can clasp fervent hands and kiss goodnight, and she tells Philip she will stop seeing Jerry. But Jerry has other plans: When Rosemary and Philip secretly meet for a date in Boston, who should spot them strolling the North End but that rascal Jerry? He soon has a chat with Rosemary in which he tells her that it would be such a shame if anyone heard that the two were fraternizing, because it would be terrible for Philip’s career—he’s angling to go to Officer Training School. Unless she continues to date Jerry and stops seeing Philip, he tells her, he will ensure Philip is not accepted into officer training. She decides she will not communicate with Philip any longer—but he stops writing to her, and now she’s hurt that he’s apparently dumped her without a word, and never mind that’s what she was planning to do to him! Her pride keeps her from writing to him, and then she gets a letter from his mother saying that she’s told Philip she will disinherit him if he marries her. She doesn’t want to believe that this is why he is not writing, but can’t quite not believe it. In the meantime she goes out on very chilly dates with Jerry. There are a few twists to the story after this, and another lovely visit to Belltown to visit her father, who immediately names the problem and the obvious solution. Thanks, Dad!

This is another sweet, gentle book from Marshall. I always enjoy visiting Belltown in them, which is painted as an idyllic small town, and Rosemary’s father is a particularly endearing character. There are a few of Rosemary’s friends who are also excellently drawn as well. Ordinarily I might find all the patriotism a little thick, but in this era when our country’s democracy seems to be paper thin, I appreciated Rosemary’s fervent dedication to protecting it. In the end, if I can’t say this is Marshall’s best book, it is certainly one worth reading.

The Midnight Wards

By D.K. Jennings (pseud. John Glasby), ©1967
Cover illustration by Henry Fox

Throughout the world, large hospitals are much the same; exuding an aura of medicinal efficiency, men and women who supervise the lives of their patients, overseeing a hubbub of intense activity that goes on around the clock. At the old and elegant St. Stephen Hospital on the outskirts of London, it had been a fortnight of the usual minor incidents, common in such a complex of wards and isolated departments. To Veronica Devlin, just beginning her hospital work as a nurse, everything seemed much larger than life. The doctors, surgeons and ward sisters were either gods or ogres and her small mistakes were great tragedies. Then the resident surgeon, Ralph Conway, found himself facing a crisis which threatened not only his career but the whole future of the hospital, a crisis which meant he had to challenge the authority of Sir William Carruthers, the senior surgical consultant, and attempt to uproot policies and ideas which were as old and as established as the hospital itself and somehow, Veronica found herself drawn, against her will, into this personal conflict of ideologies.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Someone ought to pass a law against night duty.”

“You have the makings of a fine nurse, provided you learn to keep your own emotions under tight rein and do only as you are told.”

“It seems that fate has decreed that all of the emergency cases happen between midnight and 6:00 in the morning.”

“That is the main trouble with some of the younger men who come along, wanting to become surgeons. They see themselves in white coats, walking through the wards, adored by the female patients and idolized by the young interns. But it isn’t all like that. After a while, you find that each operation takes a great deal out of you. Not until it’s over do you realize just how much.”

REVIEW:
First off, I have to tell you that this is not a nurse novel. Our nurse, Veronica Devlin, is a peripheral figure, and the story centers on Dr. Ralph Conway, hero young surgeon battling the dinosaur senior doctor who is gradually choking the life out of the prestigious hospital he runs with an iron grip. Frankly, Veronica is robbed of the credit she deserves in curing the patient central to the story, so I wondered if author D.K. Jennings was a man. Guess what—I was right!

In the first chapter a man is struck by a car and brought to the hospital, but he is suffering from amnesia—which came on before the car accident. Naturally, he is not carrying any identification. On duty in the ED are Veronica and Ralph Conway, who further clinches this book’s status as not-a-nurse-novel because he is married! Since Mr. X’s leg is broken in two places, he is likely to be stuck in the hospital for months. “In a way, it is a good thing. It may enable us to do a little detective work and try to find out who he is,” Ralph tells Veronica. 

Another patient, Sylvia Monaghan, has been admitted as a suicide attempt after taking too many sleeping tablets in the middle of the night. Ralph is convinced that she is “not the suicidal type.” But Dr. William Carruthers, the aging medico who runs St. Stephen Hospital, is convinced Sylvia is a danger to herself—not only that, but if she is not transferred to a psychiatric ward and is left on the general ward, “she could prove not only an embarrassment, but possibly a menace to the other patients,” he declares dramatically. But Ralph convinces Dr. Carruthers to leave Sylvia where she is, at least temporarily.

Meanwhile Veronica is put on night duty watching Mr. X. He is mumbling in his sleep, of course, and “she thought she caught the name Clarke repeated several times.” Ralph, going above and beyond the call of duty of a surgeon, checks with the police and finds that a jeweler named Vincent Clarke was beaten during a robbery the same night that Mr. X came in, and though the assailants were masked and Mr. Clarke has no way of identifying them, “one of them could have been our mystery patient here,” says Ralph to Veronica. So she hits the streets and starts knocking on doors, and finds an old woman who saw Mr. X walk out of an alley—and at the other end of the alley is Vincent Clarke’s jewelry shop! Back at the hospital she reluctantly reports her findings to Ralph, though she nonetheless argues that Mr. X could be innocent. Ralph wonders, “Had she fallen in love with that man?” But he does encourage her to “stick with your convictions, Veronica. I for one would not want to change them.” So he is due a little credit.

Then Veronica obtains permission from Ralph to take Mr. X out of the hospital in a wheelchair, though she does not mention her plans to bring Mr. X to the first place he remembers. Though nothing comes back to him, Mr. X directs Veronica to push him down the infamous alley, so they end up in front of Mr. Clarke’s now-boarded-up shop. He suddenly remembers being in the trashed jeweler’s shop and seeing Mr. Clarke lying inert over the counter—and the shock is too much for him and he passes out. Now Ralph is in hot water: “All of this publicity is having a bad effect on the reputation of the hospital. Some of the things he does are little too radical from my way of thinking,” says the hospital matron, though these “radical methods” are not really explained. Ralph is called on the carpet by Dr. Carruthers, and when Ralph defends Veronica, Dr. Carruthers bizarrely threatens not to give Ralph the top hospital job when he retires next year.

Undeterred, Ralph stops by Mr. X’s room, and Mr. X tells Ralph that he has remembered the names John Forrester and Redbourne. Ralph recognizes Redbourne as the name of a small village 30 miles from London, so the next day he and Veronica head there for another illicit detective trip. This book occurs so long ago that their only option is to stop in at a pub and ask if anyone knows John Forrester, and as it happens his parents live across the street! In no time flat Mr. X’s identity and backstory are laid out. “Another shock might prove sufficient to send the mind toppling over the brink of the abyss that led to insanity,” Ralph thinks, so he invites Mr. X’s mum to come back to London with them, goes straight to Mr. X and in five sentences explains all. Fortunately the shock does not prove sufficient to send Mr. X's mind toppling over the brink of the abyss; instead he remembers everything and is reunited with his mum and Veronica, so next Ralph goes to visit Sylvia Monaghan and puts to right all her psychiatric problems. Then he pops by Dr. Carruthers’ office for another enlightening chat and finally goes home to his wife, whom he is seeing for about the third time this whole book. Has anyone ever mentioned that it is really rough being a doctor’s wife? Though Ralph does try to give Veronica a little credit for Mr. X’s recovery, his wife is insistent that it is all due to him, so he smiles and leans back in his chair. I hope he doesn’t hurt himself patting his own back.

Throughout the book we do spend occasional pages with Veronica, following her concerns about Mr. X and watching the pair fall in love, though the uncertainty of his identity and past activities makes their relationship somewhat tenuous—even if we have a pretty good idea how it will turn out. But we don’t see enough of her to make this book worth reading, if it’s a true nurse novel you are looking for. It’s not a bad book in general, but without a strong, independent, female heroine to spend your time with, I’m not sure what the benefit is in reading it. But I am a little biased in that respect. Try it for yourself, if you don’t mind a rather hackneyed plot and a slightly arrogant, self-centered main (male) character, and see what you think.

Hope Farrell Crusading Nurse

By Suzanne Roberts, ©1968 

Two nurses had quit the job at Doc Brady’s Appalachian clinic the year before, quit in what Hope’s supervisor back at Community Hospital described as “anger, disgust, and plain sorrow.” Hope didn’t understand … then. She was beginning to understand now. There was so much to be done … and so much that could be done … a new clinic, a library, a school … to fight the misery on the mountain. And Hope was ready to lead that fight, but she was blocked first by the mountain people who seemed to have no desire to change anything; then by Doc Brady who long ago gave up trying to make them change; and finally by his sone, young Dr. Steve, whom she loved but who gave her a cruel choice: stay on the mountain and break her heart trying to help those who wouldn’t help themselves, or give up and come away with him …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“How can he tell me how pretty my eyes are in one breath and then start talking about thrombophlebitis?” 

“A lot of clear thoughts can come to a man while he’s eating squirrel stew.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Hope Farrell has just graduated from nursing school, and look out, world! “She came from a family of crusaders, and all that remained was to choose a geographical area where a nurse was needed, and where changes and progress could be made through hard work and dedication.”  She’s really looking forward to making her mark on the simple folk of rural Kentucky, but in the usual trend, when she is waiting in the tiny town café with a kindly proprietor who has bad teeth, a man shows up late and treats Hope with rudeness and scorn, not even helping her with her bags! He drives dangerously, and he needs a shave. “What if he’s feeble-minded or dangerous?” Hope worries, but guess who he turns out to be? Her new boss, Dr. Dan Brady, who has no interest in being welcoming or even kind to his idealistic, unrealistic nurse. “What’d you expect, some white-coated M.D. with Hero written all over him?” Well, he’s certainly not that: He exhorts Hope not to waste her time trying to improve everyone, telling her, “you can’t get that big, beautiful dream of something better by giving them free vitamins.” 

Well, Hope doesn’t agree, and on her first day, assisting at the birth of a woman’s 11^th baby in one of the mountain shacks, she tells the gathered crowd that the mother and baby should be in a hospital, not in their home, because “the baby could still get sick in there in that cabin. If we had a new hospital, when our women had babies things would be 50 percent safer!” She doesn’t understand why everyone gives her the cold shoulder after that. No doubt it’s because they are skeptical about how she arrived at her statistics.

Nonetheless, “Each morning she was filled with lovely ideas about how to stimulate people into wanting to do something about a new clinic, a library, more jobs, better food, better living conditions—” but that mean old Dr. Brady is “the biggest stumbling block” to her dreams. She won’t give up, though! When the illiteracy rate indeed turns out to be quite high, she decides to build a library, and once she’s done with that, she’s going to build a new clinic—though it’s not clear what’s wrong with the old one, apart from the fact that Hope decries its peeling paint and old curtains.  

Dan’s son Steve, a doctor on summer break from a fancy Boston hospital, shows up, and Hope is immediately convinced that Dr. Steve is going to “spark them to get going and change their whole way of living and thinking!” But he’s a chip off the old block, telling Hope, “Don’t try to sit in some ivory tower and dream up foolish dreams about a beautiful new clinic and a library and all these people suddenly wanting polio shots for their kids and lots of good books to read, because it isn’t going to work out that way.” Steve grumbles that “nobody wants to learn; nobody gives a darn about what’s happening in the outside world. They don’t even bother to take a newspaper so they can find out!” If they can’t afford food and can’t read, why should they buy a newspaper? Though she fights endlessly with Drs. Dan and Steve, getting exactly nowhere, she suddenly decides “she had fallen hopelessly in love with this angry, arrogant young man,” as you knew she would.

Then she enlists the help of some local teens to start building a library—though how a room full of books is going to improve the illiteracy rate remains unclear; wouldn’t a local teacher be more helpful?—and the kids show up at her house with scavenged bricks and lumber, and spend hours discussing the plan. But then the ringleader of the kids, Darrell, tells Hope that the kids aren’t going to help her anymore because their parents think it’s weird that they’re hanging out at the house of this single woman who goes driving alone. “No girl ever goes out by herself on this mountain,” he tells her—and that’s not all. “You’re tellin’ them that everything they’ve done for over a hundred years is all wrong. It’s like—well, like folks have lived and died and raised families and got by all right, and then somebody like you—a young girl from somewhere else, comes up here and stays a few weeks and tells them they’re nothin’.” He has a point.

Hope, finally giving up, decides to quit her job—but on her way out of town, the alarm goes out that a young girl has gotten trapped in the old abandoned mine and that Dr. Dan has gone in after her—and Steve follows after both of them, because doctors are super expendable, and all these out-of-work miners couldn’t possibly be of assistance. Standing outside and nibbling her nails, Hope decides that “even if this mountain and its people were going to give her a hard time, try to force her out, try to ridicule and hurt her, still—she belonged there and she was staying.” It’s not hard to figure out that Dr. Dan is not coming out, and Hope decides he went into the mine because “he felt so guilty at not having changed things.” She decrees, “Doctor Brady had died in a desperate attempt to make up to these people for what he had stopped trying to give them, hope and courage and a kind of inner strength to forge ahead and make their lives better and more meaningful. He had known he had failed them, and in that last moment he had wanted to do something good for them. That was why he had crawled into the mine to save little Candy.” Furthermore, she suddenly decides that “she’d come to love” and “given all of herself to Appalachia and its people.” Hope has seriously lost all touch with reality.

And now, suddenly, the people are forcing milk on their children and buying ice for the ice box even if it’s expensive and they don’t have any money and half of the ice has melted by the time they get it home and most of them don’t have cars to get to town to buy it. But “that’s what Doc Brady always wanted us to do,” And now they’ve decided to do everything he wanted! Hooray!

This book is simplistic and stupid, basically declaring that no one need be poor if they don’t want to be, “if we only had the gumption.” Where the jobs and money—much less the teachers—are going to come from is breezily ignored. None of the characters are admirable; the two doctors’ angry relentless pessimism is no more believable than Hope’s angry relentless optimism. The worst stubborn ignorance in the book is Hope’s, and it’s difficult to watch her win in the end when she does not deserve it; she has not grown or adapted or attempted to understand or even befriend anyone on the mountain. The Crusades were religious wars in which Christians invaded and conquered other countries that didn’t agree with their beliefs, and Hope has the same take-no-prisoners attitude in her own crusade. It wasn’t pretty then, and it’s not pretty now.

Prison Nurse

By William Neubauer, ©1962
Cover illustration by Robert Maguire

Young Nurse Vivian’s heart went out to the inmates at Clairmount County Correctional Facility. She knew that a good nurse had to be unemotional, but she also knew that behind those forbidding walls young girls were being treated like animals! In the hospital recuperating from a near fatal clubbing she had received at the hands of some would-be-escapees, Vivian found herself the center of city-wide attention. Newspaper editorials lauded her heroism; the Mayor himself came to her bedside to bestow civic awards. But when Vivian argued that the Facility ought to rehabilitate its inmates instead of brutalizing them, the young nurse made a powerful enemy of the Mayor whose plans called for closing the Facility and shipping the girls off to adult prisons. It would take every bit of Vivian’s courage and determination and the dedicated help of her fiancé—a young lawyer who represented a group in opposition to the Mayor’s program—to save, and help the inmates who knew Vivian Hartwell as their Prison Nurse.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“A degree or a badge simply announces to the world that you have received a certain measure of education and training.” 

“Too bad you have a heart. It does get you into trouble.”

“The best years of almost any woman’s life are those between fifteen and twenty-one. It’s the time for dates, for conquests at dances.”

“I’m strictly cornball. Daddy, you’ll have to let me buy some shorts. All the kids are wearing them. I won’t be embarrassed like this!”

“Does it matter if a rattlesnake bites you because he’s bored or because he’s mean or because he don’t know better?”

“We must examine this brain. We eliminate the consciousness, the resistance. We address ourselves to the subconscious mind. We record. We study. We untangle the tangled. Then into the world one day there walks the finest of creations, a sane woman.”

“I read somewhere that a successful man always has a woman behind him. I’ve simply got to get me some woman behind me.”

REVIEW:
As part of her regular hospital duty, Nurse Vivian Hartwell spends two days a week at the Clairmount County Correctional Facility for Girls in Washington state. It’s a harsh place, complete with solitary confinement, ugly gray uniforms and lockstep marching to chow, “grinding discipline for those who have not grown accustomed to the disciplines of study and work.” Vivian, however, has other ideas, that the kids should have “punishment, yes; discipline, yes; but as a mother punishes her child—with understanding, not vindictiveness. They are at the Facility to be rehabilitated, not to pay grim penalties for heinous crimes.” When Vivian is assaulted while stopping a prison break long enough for the escapees to be caught, she doesn’t decide that maybe the bitches deserve what they get; rather, the fame of her heroism gives her a platform to express her unchanged philosophy. “When you treat children like criminals you convince them they’re criminals. And when you demonstrate to children that society is harsh, even brutal, you don’t create women who will love society,” she explains. “I just hate to see anyone denied a fair chance to become an average woman. Very emotional, I know, but there it is.” Unfortunately her opinions are not well-supported by the town mayor, who blackmails the hospital chief by threatening to veto the city’s funding for the hospital if Vivian isn’t fired for speaking out. 

When told of the chief’s awkward position, Vivian nobly quits her job. Hospital staff who will be assigned to the Facility now that she is no longer there to do it become concerned about their own safety at the Facility and refuse to work there, so Vivian is hired as full-time nurse at the prison. There she interacts a lot with 15-year-old Alicia Malone, who is in for assault and who appears to be constantly plotting her escape, which pretty much everyone should realize.

The mayor, meanwhile, is plotting to close the Facility because he believes that having a prison in town stunts business interest and community growth; he wants to sell the facility’s land to an electronics corporation for a factory that would create new jobs. He’s thwarted at every turn, though, by Vivian’s crusading, which results in, among other things, the mayor’s daughter Hazel being elected president of the Friendly Sisters club, which collects dresses for the prisoners so they can look nice—the first step toward better living through fashion—as well as funds to send the inmates to professional school upon their release. “The world is tough enough even for a well-dressed gal,” notes the mayor’s own secretary, who goes on to deliver a lovely speech to him about how Vivian, who has heart and the courage of her convictions, will triumph in the end because she has ideals and he does not. You kind of have to feel sorry for the poor guy.

Alicia Malone continues to bide her time, meanwhile, watching the relaxing guard. Vivian knows this, but is unable to convince Alicia that an escape attempt would just buy her more time in confinement. “But they had to break it up. The Friendly Sisters came to the infirmary, the last stop on their protracted tour. Candy for the patients! Cologne for the patients! And Alicia smiling sweetly upon one and all saying, ‘Honest to God, I sincerely mean this is just the nicest afternoon of my life.’ Meanwhile the mind of Alicia was going clank, clank, clank in a never-ending, relentless sort of way.” And Alicia does escape, in an ingenious way—but Vivian is just as ingenious, and saves the day—and the kid, which you knew would happen. She even plays her war with the mayor, brilliantly tidying up the mess. Then it’s “back to the jute mill! Walk the million miles, soothe the uncomfortable, close the eyes of the dead. Wonderful life.”

The most bizarre thing about Vivian as a character is that throughout the book she keeps insisting that she’s really not that interested in nursing. “I’m not the dedicated type, I’m afraid,” she lies. “I enjoy being a nurse. I enjoy being useful. I enjoy the prestige of being in a profession. But I want more than a glorious life of service. I long to have a husband, children, a middle-class home, a nice car, fine clothes, even a jewel or two.” And of course she scores a diamond from her lawyer beau, Bill, at the end, when he graciously agrees, “you won’t have to quit until you want to.” Thanks!

The book also includes a paragraph that I have to wonder is autobiographical: “She bummed a ride from a crippled man who’d come to the clinic to be measured for a new leg brace. The man had obviously contracted polio when just a child. His torso was abnormally burly, but he had an abdominal sag and looked pathetically shrunken from the waist down. He lived at peace with his handicap, however. ‘Always glad to give a little nurse a helping hand. Makes up for the bad times I used to give them when I was a kid. In this boys’ ward I was in, we were always playing tricks on the nurses. Like once for a nurse’s birthday, we packed a white rat in a box and wrapped the box real pretty.’” (Remember that author William Neubauer contracted polio as a child and walked with braces and crutches his whole life; read more about this fascinating man here.)

This is a truly fun book. The characters are well-drawn, compelling and complex. The nursing supervisor—author Neubauer has a real soft spot for nursing supervisors—is a crisp but lovable woman who is always delivering maxims with a twinge of humor such as, “Hartwell, do you know why I constantly remind you a nurse is never emotional? Emotionalism is a lack of discipline. An undisciplined mind rarely copes effectively with emergencies of any type. Tears in your eyes? Tell me, Hartwell, could you assist at surgery right now? Of course not.” The plot has a few twists at the end that you actually could not have predicted, but it’s not too confusing—which admittedly can happen in a Neubauer book—to follow. I am a big fan of William Neubauer, who was a truly interesting individual and a great writer, and in Prison Nurse he has completely lived up to my confidence in his abilities.

That Nice Nurse Nevin

By Jan Tempest, ©1963

Eight years ago Eunice Nevin had been rich and carefree. Now, her father dead in her money gone, she was a hard-working nurse. Her old home had become the hospital where she was now to work. With the love she had found for her new life be strong enough to overcome her nostalgia for the old?

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“To be a successful beauty and heartbreaker, one has to have a certain mentality. One has to care passionately for admiration and for pleasing people. I don’t. I have to say what I think, and that doesn’t endear a girl to men.” 

“If money doesn’t talk, what’s the use of it?”

REVIEW:
Eunice Nevin is the sort of heroine it’s not hard to like. She’d been orphaned at 18 after an upper-class upbringing when her father was financially ruined making some risky investments and dropped dead from the shock. The icing on her tragic cake came when she’d been dumped by her handsome cad of a boyfriend, Eamonn Crail, so she’d moved to London and gone to nursing school. Now at 25 she has returned to her hometown and a hospital that has been established at her former home, so large and expansive were the house and grounds.

Eunice is soon drawn into the upper-crust circle of the Yaxley family, headed by social-climbing, scheming mother Shuna. Martin is the oldest child, and everyone seems to believe that Eunice is going to be the one who drags Martin to the altar, but she finds him to be a wishy-washy milquetoast who can’t stand up to his domineering mother. The younger twin girls, Tilly and Thyme, are fans of Eunice’s, as they had grown up watching her ride horses in competition—and usually win. Thyme has some sort of kidney disease and needs a transplant, while Tilly needs a transplant of her own—a spine, as she wants to pursue a career in music while her mother wants her to pursue wealthy men with royal titles, and mom is winning the battle. But behind mom’s back, Tilly has taken up with Eamonn—though he is actually in love with Thyme, who had turned him down because he is poor.

At the hospital, Eunice spars with 40-year-old urological surgeon Jupiter Janine, and it’s not hard to see where that’s headed. He appreciates her outspokenness, and kids her about the fact that she’s “known as ‘that Nice Nurse Nevin.’ Such a singularly inappropriate adjective for a personality as spicy as yours.” It’s admirable that she is such a feisty gal, but I continue to be perplexed and unsettled by the large number of Harlequin nurse novels that give the heroine away to a man more than ten years her senior—fifteen in this case.

The book is made more unique by its heavy concentration on riding, and we attend quite a few shows, ride frequently through the countryside, and admire numerous horses. As for our lead character, Eunice is also more unusual, a strong, outspoken woman, and only once declares, “it would be a real wrench to give up nursing,” but in the end plans to keep at it until she has children. The book has a good-sized cast of interesting characters (though Eunice’s girlhood best friend turns out to be a nasty, selfish witch, and it’s not at all clear why Eunice continues to interact with her), and overall the book has more than most VNRNs to make it worth reading. The writing isn’t witty or remarkable enough to push it into an A grade, but there is more than enough here to make for a nice read.

Doctor Mary

By Jeanne Judson, ©1964

Her fiancé, Henry Clifford, a rising young lawyer, couldn’t understand why Dr. Mary Spencer chose to live in Chinatown. Her best friend, Dr. Edith Silliman, wanted Mary to join her in an expensive practice in an exclusive neighborhood. Both Henry and Edith thought Dr. Mary was a fool. And perhaps, thought Mary, they were right. Who but a fool would alienate her best friend and her sweetheart and the prospect of the successful career, to follow a dream — a dream of helping the poor. But, wise or foolish, Dr. Mary was going to continue in the past she had marked out for herself.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“People who are always right are unbearable.” 

“It’s surprising how many people in New York will go anywhere if there is a prospect of lots of free champagne.”

“In cases of high blood pressure there is almost always some frustration or worry that increases the trouble.”

REVIEW:
Sometimes it’s hard to pick up a book because its cover is so appalling. Eventually, though, you become so sick of looking at this cover that you are forced to read the book just so that you can put it away in the back bedroom with all the other books you’ve already read, saving your delicate sensibilities from further encounters. Such was the case with me and Doctor Mary. The fact that it was written by Jeanne Judson, who has been known to put out some excellent books—though I haven’t met one recently, unfortunately—was not much of a lure. But now the job is done, and I can report that the book is in fact better than its cover, but maybe not so much that you should run out and buy a copy. 

Dr. Mary Spencer is a lonely orphan who, upon graduating from medical school a year earlier, moved to Mott Street in New York City’s Chinatown to practice medicine. She had picked this spot as a launching pad for her medical career because during her internship she had encountered many Chinese patients and found them “so patient and polite.” “I haven’t any family to impress with my brilliance, and I don’t know any Joneses to keep up with, so when I finished at St. Vincent’s that’s where I went,” she explained her decision. She likes the interesting neighborhood and her patient population, even if she’s not getting rich like her med school classmate Dr. Edith Silliman, who at book’s open is pressing her to join a practice with her on E. 71st St. “If only you’ll be sensible, Mary,” chides Edith. “If you’ll get an office uptown and stop all this do-gooding,” she says, Mary might be able to keep her fiancé, up-and-coming attorney Henry Clifford.

Edith has a point: Henry has already told her, “You can see for yourself that it wouldn’t do for a member of one of the leading law firms to have a wife working in the slums. If you stay here, it will be no marriage at all.” But Mary wants to “work with an uplifted heart,” and has found her calling: “For her, it was a vocation; for Edith, it was a profession.” It takes Mary no time at all to refuse Edith, and not much longer to come to her senses after Henry tells her, “You must choose, Mary. I love you, but I have no intention of ruining both our lives by letting you continue in this absurd obsession about helping people who aren’t willing to help themselves.” So when the afternoon mail brings an engraved wedding invitation to Edith and Henry’s upcoming nuptials, “when her head stopped whirling, she thought that nothing could be more suitable.”

Mary spends about ten minutes feeling sorry for herself, but then she starts thinking about this guy she met while taking care of a patient with pneumonia. Jim Tracy is unemployed and living in a seedy residence hotel: “Despite the need of a shave and a haircut, he was well dressed. Also, and more surprising, he looked clean. He had spoken like an educated man. He was young and, though underweight, apparently healthy. But what was he doing in Joe Grimes’s hotel when he was perfectly competent to hold down a good job, routine, perhaps, but respectable?” Between cases she goes out with the man, who is alternatively kind and grouchy, but he is always able to pay for dinner despite his low living conditions. Even more curious, he is able to engage Dr. Grenning, the city’s top cardiologist, to see an impoverished pediatric patient of Mary’s for free. Unfortunately, after a mere three encounters with the man, “the awful truth came to her. She loved him. She loved him. Thief, murderer, whenever he was, she loved him. She wouldn’t marry him because he wouldn’t have her. Still, it was good to love even if the love were never returned.” Ugh.

When the cardiologist shows up, it turns out he’s an old friend of Jim’s, who is—surprise!—Dr. Jim Tracy, “one of the best bacteriologists in the country—a man who could have a big future.” But Jim is done with his career, he says: “I got this way by killing my wife.” It’s only another dozen pages before we find out that his wife was a pretty but shallow debutante whom Jim had married too quickly, only to find out they weren’t compatible. She had wanted to party, and he had wanted to work, which meant they lived essentially separate lives, she with her socializing friends, and even a few gentlemen escorts as well — until one day, coming down the stairs in a beautiful, trailing gown to open the door for another party, she “tripped on some chiffon and fell halfway down the stairs.” She lived “long enough to tell Jim that it was all his fault, that it was his indifference, his coldness, that was killing her.” That or the broken neck, it’s hard to tell for sure. After this revelation, though, all the guilt that has caused Jim to abandon his former life for years is quickly boxed up and put away into storage, never to peek out at us again.

As the closet door is swinging shut, Mary is enlisted by Dr. Grenning to help persuade Jim to sign up for a two-year stint at a brand-new hospital in the wilds of Brazil, though at the dinner party where Jim is won over to the project, she doesn’t do much more than pass the gravy. One thing I do like about Dr. Mary, however, is that she goes after what she wants. Before the dinner with Dr. Grenning, where she had learned the truth of his past, she had written to Jim to say, “Whatever they have to tell me, I’d rather hear it from you. I don’t want to know anything about you that you don’t want to tell me yourself. I love you.” And on the way home from dinner, Jim talks about how the new hospital’s staff (being all male, of course) is not likely to be married because “for the wives it will be insects and heat and snakes and noise.” Undaunted, Mary retorts, “It might be different for a woman if she were a doctor, too.” You go, girl.

Overall this is a fairly straightforward story without exceptional interest, outside of the ad for Newport cigarettes bound into the book, which was printed in the era before cigarette advertising was outlawed. If one or two characters demonstrate bigotry toward the Chinese, Mary does not, seeing only hard-working immigrants pursuing the American dream; her most prominent Chinese patient eventually brings his two grandsons to the country to study at Columbia, aided by Jim Tracy, who had grown up alongside Chinese workers on his family’s pineapple plantation in Hawaii and is completely fluent in multiple dialects of Chinese. Actually, in this book it’s the white family that is stuck with a drunken, abusive, jobless patriarch, and no one is sorry to see him drop of pneumonia in the end; the black and Asian families Mary cares for may be poor, but they won’t be for long, especially when the kids graduate from an Ivy League college. It’s pleasant enough, but a little disappointing for author Judson, who has given us the delightful Small Town Nurse, Visiting Nurse, and City Nurse, three A-grade gems. Those books came out in the 1950s, however, giving more evidence to my belief that the more recently a book was written, the worse it is likely to be. Given the fact that the four reviews of her books published in the ’60s earned a C+ average with no grade higher than a B, it seems that this dread curse is so powerful that not even the talented Jeanne Judson was immune to it.

Nurse Ann in Surgery

By Ruth MacLeod, ©1965
Cover illustration by Bob Schinella 

Ann Phillips returned to Crestridge with a whole new life ahead of her. She was going to start her career as a nurse-anesthetist, and she was going to marry Dr. Frank Parker, whom she had loved for so many years. But when she learned that while she had been away, Frank had decided to marry someone else, Ann buried her hurt by filling her life with her hospital work. Then, Frank came to her saying that he had made a mistake and would she renew their engagement. She asked herself whether Frank really knew his own heart … and besides there were whispering words of an exciting young intern warning her not to make a second mistake.

GRADE: B+ 

BEST QUOTES:
“Tears do have a way of invading the nasopharynx instead of rolling like pearls down a rosy cheek.” 

“You’ll most likely marry before long and find you need your time to rear a family. At least I hope so—for your sake. That’s a woman’s highest calling.”

REVIEW:
Ann Phillips is particularly interesting in that she is a nurse anesthetist. Current-day CRNAs will likely appreciate the description of her job, which includes administering anesthetic as directed by the surgeon, which is curious because nowadays it’s the CRNA or anesthesiologist who makes that call, and also because she’s usually using sodium pentothal. Furthermore, she manually bags the patient—squeezes a bag every six seconds to push air into the lungs, a job today performed by a machine—for the entire surgery, which can last hours, and reports the patient’s condition aloud “every minute or so.” And with administering IV fluids and medications, and blood products when necessary, Ann’s got a lot to do! 

But this pales in comparison to juggling her personal life. She’s returning home to fiancé Dr. Frank Parker, who is a rising would-be surgeon and son of brilliant chief surgeon Dr. Stuart Parker, for her first job since receiving her certification. “We’ve been engaged since he graduated from medical school,” Ann reports to one hopeful young man. “I haven’t seen him much since then,” which is at least two years ago. “Maybe he’ll have become a creep,” says the astute gentleman, who can read the writing on the wall better than Ann. Sure enough, on their first so-called date, Frank tells Ann he’s in love with the new OR nurse, Carisse Moffett, and breaks their engagement. It’s not hard to understand why, as Ann “could never compete with a girl like Carisse whose beauty was matched by her charming poise and grace.” None of which make you a good person, but values were different in the Sixties. In fact, however, Carisse is a lovely person who becomes very interested in Ann’s work and decides that she, too, will become a nurse anesthetist, and the two become friends as Ann takes her under her wing and helps her get started with applying to the training programs.

Frank, on the other hand, quickly proves he deserves neither the charming Charisse or the plucky Ann. He’s constantly bungling the more intricate surgeries, and when Ann expresses her admiration of an appendectomy he’s pulled off without killing the patient, she’s corrected by talented resident Dr. Robin Price. “It was a neat, workman-like performance,” he points out. “Exactly what should be expected of an intern on his first assignment. If a resident surgeon couldn’t perform that well he should be sent back to medical school”—and he concludes with the zinger that what could have been done in seven or eight minutes took Frank over half an hour. 

Worse than that, Frank comes bumbling to Ann, pleading with her to take him back, that “I got off to a bad start—I’ve been all upset inside. That’s why I need you, darling! I’ve been all torn up inside and it affects my work. I need our love! Then I can settle down to the practice it takes to do good work.” Instead of vomiting, Ann, who seems to be driven more by the rush she gets when kissing Frank, succumbs, despite the disapproval of her entire family, and Frank breaks off his engagement with Carisse to take up with Ann again. It becomes clear that this yo-yoing is due in part to pressure from his family, although it’s not obvious why they object to Carisse when they’d objected to Ann as well. Carisse proves again to be the best person in the triangle and bears no grudge at all against Ann, and continues their friendship and works with flawless professionality with both in the OR.

Meanwhile, Ann demonstrates that at least professionally she has a spine. When her anesthesiologist boss suggests that she couldn’t handle open-heart surgery, she interrupts him to insist, “Oh yes I could!” And she suggests to both Frank and his father that he might be better suited for a different specialty, though both are equally outraged at the thought. Never mind that in one emergency surgery “Frank’s incompetence cost the man’s life,” and when her own mother needs a pacemaker, Ann talks her out of having Frank do the job. “He isn’t exactly incompetent,” she explains to her mother in ringing praise, but thinks to herself, “Thank God it was Dr. Stuart in charge—not Frank!”

Eventually Frank is called out for his dithering during a ventral septal defect repair and, finally at the end of his patience, he “snatched off his mask and cap and stomped from the room.” This enormous breach of aseptic protocol should certainly cost a surgeon their hospital privileges on the spot. When the operation is over, Ann rushes to console Frank, only to find Carisse has beaten her to it, so the motion-sick, tempest-toss’d ring goes bouncing back to Carisse, but not before Ann has again tried to set Frank straight. “You’ll ruin your own life and ours too, if you don’t grow up and make your own decisions!” she explodes—not to mention all the other patients he’ll maim or murder. “It’s time for you to quit behaving like a child”—though she could benefit from her own advice, as she’s never been entirely convinced that Frank’s return to her was completely honest. Ann’s scolding, apparently, is what it takes for Frank to tell his father what he really wants in both career and marriage, and “she experienced only a numb sense of relief that his feet, at last, were set on the right path”—and never mind that his finally making the difficult decision obviates her from doing the same.

In the end, she ends up not with a fiancé but with a solid prospect who is an excellent surgeon—illustrating another curious VNRN theme that the heroine never ends up with someone who is not good at his job. Would I love my husband less if he was lousy at his profession? It’s a curious question. Overall I’m slightly bothered that Ann is highly capable at work, and yet cannot demonstrate the same incisiveness when it comes to Frank, instead allowing herself to be buffeted by his storm—not to mention dumped twice! Otherwise, it’s an interesting book worth reading, and not just to admire Ann’s grip strength as she squeezes the ambu-bag 2,400 times in a two-hour surgery.

Children’s Hospital

By Elizabeth Gilzean, ©1960
Cover illustration by Jack Harmon 

Sandra Lorraine took great pride in her children’s ward at St. Christopher’s and she resented the “new broom” methods of the new consultant, Peter Donaldson. There were many clashes between them before they came to understand each other.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“She got a clean cup out of the cupboard, filled it, sugared it and passed it to Matron. She seemed to be spending a lot of time resuscitating senior hospital staff.” 

“It was one of those wild coincidences that only happen in real life.”

“All the ward Sisters I’ve known have been hatchet-faced women who come around with little books asking you the most intimate questions.”

REVIEW:
Sandra Lorraine is perhaps one the oldest heroines I have met in 10 years of VNRN reviews. She is a shocking 26, and has been ward chief the Westwood Ward of Saint Christopher’s Hospital for years when we meet her. She has no friends, certainly no boyfriends, and she’s estranged from her father, who is off honeymooning with a woman she can’t stand. Her entire life is going to work and her pediatric patients: “They were her world and no one could touch it.” 

Then surgeon Peter Donaldson appears and shakes up her tidy little cocoon. This audacious man wants to do rounds in the afternoon instead of the morning, wants to allow parents on the ward even when it is not visiting hours, and asks her to work through her lunch hour! Furthermore, he has a grand scheme to add adult patients to the mix at Saint Christopher’s with the idea that this will improve the hospital’s chances of survival. Outrageous! He is equally disgusted with her views: “I don’t know whether you realize it, but you’re a dangerous menace to medical progress,” he tells her. And he kind of has a point. “Never in her life had she been so insulted, upset, hauled over the coals, blackmailed, provoked, stimulated, attracted, or repelled by any man.” So it is clear where all this is heading. She is a good nurse, however, and Dr. Donaldson sees potential in her that he attempts to draw out by any means necessary. “I feel that only shock tactics will jolt you out of your smug little rut and make a worthwhile human being out of you,” he tells her when he takes her out for coffee on their first date.

Interestingly, she rises to the challenge. “She did not like change ... she did not even want it. But wasn’t there something exciting about the challenge he had thrown her? The prospect of building up a new unit, the spur of grappling with different problems, of learning more so that she could help her beloved children to better advantage ... she would enjoy it, wouldn’t she?” And gradually she comes to appreciate her new boss’s techniques. There are challenges along the way, however, one of them being a new surgeon who joins the team. Gordon Rainswick is a fellow who leaves Sandra “shaking with terror,” though why that might be is never clearly spelled out to us. He’s a wolfish sort, though, so it’s not hard to guess. Peter, seeing Sandra’s overwrought response to the man, asks if she needs help, but here we have an admirable gesture from writer Elizabeth Gilzean, who has Sandra decide not to cut and run but to stand her ground. “If only she could slip a note of resignation under Matron’s door and quietly disappear, but that could be no way out for her. She could imagine the scorn, and even the disappointment, that would be on Peter Donaldson’s face if she chose the easy way out. Perhaps he was right. Perhaps she had been doing that all her life, but he had thrown the challenge at her feet. Having picked it up she could no longer deny its implications. She had to prove she was worthy to be his ward Sister, equal to the increased responsibilities he had been placing on her shoulders, mature enough to cope with the problems, not only of her professional life, but also of her private life.”

And that, unfortunately, is the high point of the book. In reality, Sandra talks a good talk, and even agrees to meet Gordon to have it out with him, but they immediately get into a car crash and she’s saved from having to actually do anything. Nor is it ever clear exactly what the problem is, though it’s insinuated that at some point in the past he’d gotten her into a compromising situation and, even if nothing happened, the trauma of the potential ruin of her reputation leaves her a quivering jelly. The fact that he’s her new stepmother’s cousin seems also to play into the unseen scandal, as does the fact that she resents her father’s new wife, but that’s never explained, either. Instead, Peter’s mother tells a story of how she was coerced into a similar situation decades ago and escaped by throwing a chair and jumping out a window. And from then on Sandra is wreathed in smiles and can finally return the love that Peter has been desperately trying to shower her with from early on in the book (though she maddeningly pretends, “He showed no signs of even approving of her most of the time.” I don’t know what’s wrong with these heroines who appear to be in a completely different book than the one we are reading.).

Compounding my disappointment in Sandra is the fact that she’s also dealing with Annette, a nurse on her ward who’s surly and insubordinate, and though she promises Peter that she is up to handle the challenge, when the nurse (for about the tenth time) lets loose with a long paragraph of invective, it’s one of the hospital doctors—who is bafflingly in love with this woman, who is just as mean to him as she is to Sandra—who swoops in to save the day. Adding to my dismay is the fact that he carries the moment by grabbing Annette’s arm tightly and dragging her forcefully out of the room. “Sandra saw that her staff nurse was gazing at John Carruthers as if he were a stranger, a stranger who had suddenly appeared fascinating. Annette’s eyes widened in startled surprise before following meekly in the wake of a man who appeared to have belatedly discovered how to handle it.”

Another problematic incident occurs when Sandra is asked to give a speech before the hospital’s board of directors about whether the hospital should admit adults. She waffles before her speech about whether she actually thinks it’s the horrible idea she believed it at book’s open, influenced no doubt by the fact that Peter is in favor of it, but he tells her to stick to her guns and give it her all. She delivers a heartfelt speech about caring for children, and the hospital board decides to keep the adults away. Then it’s suggested that Peter might have actually changed his mind for once and now agrees with Sandra, but again, it’s hard to tell if that’s the case, because the story never comes out and tells us.

Peter is an affectionate beau, and it’s not clear why he keeps after cold Sandra, who even when they are engaged cannot tell him she loves him until ten pages later, though he’s altogether soggy with affection. Those last pages become especially excruciating when rainbows and unicorns start turning up everywhere: “Sandra tried to subdue the feeling of excitement which was bubbling up inside her, threatening to overflow like a child’s bowl of soap bubbles, and her happiness was painting the bubbles with fairy colors.” And that’s just one sentence. Overall it’s not a terrible book, one that hints at good intentions, but nevertheless it is regularly disappointing, with bland, trite characters—in particular our heroine, who lives in a shell and never actually comes out of it, for all the suggestions to the contrary. If author Elizabeth Gilzean wrote with more conviction and endowed her characters with it, this would have been a much better book.