Dr. Jenny of Timberland

By Isabel Stewart Way, ©1964

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

GRADE: B-

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The White Jacket

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

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

GRADE: A-

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

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

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

“Nothing worthwhile ever is simple.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Doctor Jane

Book 2 of 6
By Adeline McElfresh, ©1955

Lovely, dark-haired Jane Langford had but one dream—to become a doctor. Orphaned, penniless, she fought her way through her internship in a big, tough, city hospital. A brilliant career lay before her. But tall, handsome Lance Hart—ambitious and socially prominent young lawyer—wanted Jane to renounce her dream, to belong to him alone. This is the story of a beautiful young woman forced to choose between a life of luxury and the stern rewards of her dedicated profession—of her daring quest for the truth which led her into a bitter battle against powerful and evil forces.

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“That beautiful head of yours is as empty as the gourds I used to use for birds; nests when I was a kid. You could have a husband and a couple of kids—half a dozen, if you wanted them—but here you sit, waiting to go chasing off in an ambulance or to be called to Emergency.”

 

“Don’t go clinical on me, Dr. Langford. I don’t enjoy kissing a test tube.”

 

“I don’t see any royal carpet. Are you sure they’re expecting you?”

 

“I’m sick! Quick, someone, call me a beautiful doctor!”

 

REVIEW:

I have seldom been more disappointed by a VNRN than I was when I finished Dr. Jane, Interne, the debut novel in this series about Dr. Jane Langford. I am pleased to say that this follow-up novel does much better, and I have to admit that the cliffhanger is an effective way of propelling you on to the next installment in a series.

 

When we last left Jane, she had agreed to give up her most fervent dream of being a surgeon at City Hospital to join the staff of one of those posh and distasteful convalescent hospitals for rich neurotic patients. It’s smooth Lance Hart, the object of a schoolgirl-like crush, who has persuaded her to do so, as he had been unable to convince her to abandon medicine altogether, and this seems like the next-best he can do. She had also agreed to marry Lance, whom we know is completely wrong for her. As I said, it was quite an upsetting conclusion for our otherwise strong, dedicated, brilliant, and honorable heroine, and I remain upset that Jane tossed her career in surgery away without any apparent regret, particularly after the extreme dedication and hard work toward that goal we witnessed in Dr. Jane, Interne.

 

As this book begins, Jane is a year into her tenure at the convalescent hospital, and she is still not married to Lance. She’s not happy, with Lance or her career, but neither does she seem sure she wants to give either up. Furthermore, her emotional growth has been nonexistent, and she agrees with Lance that she would want the word obey included in her wedding vows—though she has gotten where she is today precisely because she has refused to obey, fighting the bromides of the medical establishment about what women should be. She decides to take the weakest form of action, a leave of absence, and goes back to the small town where she grew up poor and orphaned and miserable. Dr. Ed Johnson, the Old Doctor, begs her to temporarily step in for him so he can have the first vacation he’s had in decades—three months, the lucky guy. She agrees, and soon she’s making house calls and seeing patients—and Lance, who drops by from the city to sneer at the small town and make Jane swoon in giddy lovesickness that I should have become somewhat inoculated against after the first book, but no such luck: “Don’t let me go, Lance! her heart cried. Don’t ever let me go!” You see what I mean.

 

Soon, though, she’s entangled in a scandal, after the wife of the son of the owner of the town’s major enterprise, the box factory, runs over a small child in the street. Jane is the only eyewitness, and swears that the driver, Mrs. Lola Morton, never even swerved or braked as she sped through town. Lance turns up, now an attorney hired by Mr. Morton to hush up the incident and keep Lola out of jail, and begs Jane to drop the case. Though weak in the knees from Lance’s kisses, Jane clings with the barest of fingertips to her conviction and refuses to drop her accusations. Soon the town drunk turns up as a “witness,” clearly bribed to swear Lola did indeed try to avoid the child, and Jane’s patients, whose livelihoods depend on corrugated cardboard, stop showing up for their appointments. Jane is convinced that Lance is behind all this, and the pair stops seeing each other.

 

Next door, however, is Minister Bill Latham, a calm, dependable type whom Jane likes immediately. He is always supportive of her job, never objects when she has to cancel a dinner date, and even runs helpful errands for her. She’s slowly falling for him, but there’s the small matter of that photograph on his desk of a young woman signed, “With all my love …” God forbid she just ask the man about it.

 

Most of the book is about Jane’s work with the townspeople, and this works out well for us readers. Jane is quietly humorous, serious, and never foolish, outside of her relationship with Lance (though to her credit, her increasing distaste for him speaks of a similarly increasing maturity in terms of her love life). Her growing love for Bill feels neither sophomoric nor frivolous, the way her feeling for Lance does. Though it’s obvious from the word go how Jane’s decision to leave town for good when Dr. Ed returns from vacation is going to play out, the book overall is so gentle and pleasant that I didn’t mind a little simplicity of plot. So while the opening salvo of the Doctor Jane series had me a bit worried, with this next all is forgiven, and I look forward to Calling Dr. Jane—though if the series stretches on for four more books, somehow I expect that Bill is doomed.

Alternative cover

Dr. Jane, Interne

Book 1 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1966

 

Jane Langford was the only woman in the new crop of interns at City Hospital. She soon found that the great Dr. Gillian, Chief of Surgery, hated women doctors and was using all his power to keep her out of the medical profession. The young male interns watched. Loyal Dr. Clem Bartlett gave her encouragement. Dr. Peter Farley pretended to cheer her on, but hoped she would fail so he could have her to himself. Conniving, cynical Dr. Hal Normal was frankly her enemy … But what of Dr. Tom Waycross—handsome, moody, fanatically dedicated—who stirred such dangerous new emotions in her untried heart?

 

GRADE: B

 

BEST QUOTES:

“The average woman had neither the physical nor the emotional stamina for the often long, long sessions at the operating table; she wasn’t psychologically constructed to dissect, to slice away at human tissue, to saw through bone, or nibble it away with a rongeur.”

 

“No woman has any business becoming a doctor. More specifically, I feel that no woman has any business becoming a surgeon. Women have neither the physical nor the emotional stamina that Medicine and Surgery, especially surgery, too often demand, even in training, and because they do not possess that physical and emotional strength and stability, they too often expect the way to be made easier for them because of their sex.”

 

“Hal isn’t such a bad sort, when you forget he’s a louse.”

 

“I’m sick! Quick, someone, call me a beautiful doctor!”

 

“The prescription in a case like yours is one glass of water dashed in the face.”

 

“Don’t kiss me again, not like that, not now—not when I’ve got to go back and do a skull series.”

 

REVIEW:

Dr. Jane Langford is just starting her (guess) intern year at City Hospital. She’s wanted to be a surgeon since she was a wee lass, and much is made throughout the book of the hard road she’s had in getting to this point: Her parents died when she was in high school and she’s had to work a number of odd jobs to finance her education. Which means that she’s had exactly zero time to cultivate her personal—or love—life. And which explains her rather schoolgirl crush on Dr. Tom Wayford; she pines to hear his name called over the intercom or catch a glimpse of him up on the pediatrics floor. And when they do finally get together, her joy is boundless: “She was locked in Tom’s embrace, and that was all that mattered—all that would ever truly matter, she told herself.” It’s a little unsettling to see a woman who has dedicated so much to her career thrust it so quickly to the back seat once she kisses a boy.

 

But her relationship with Tom is fairly peripheral to the story, and though we are reminded from time to time of her excited infatuation, the bulk of the story is about her travails as she passes through the various specialties in the hospital. Though it must be confessed that her travails are more social—a long-time doctor friend, Peter Farley, is always calling her “honey” and kissing her in public, though she feels nothing more than friendship for him (apparently, just telling him to stop! never crosses her mind), and the gossip mill is whirling with the idea that the chief of surgery, Dr. James Gillian, hates women doctors. (One nice touch is that as the book progresses, the story of why he feels this way gradually becomes increasingly embellished through the grapevine, and we’re never quite sure how much of this growing legend is actually true.) Her medical exploits are always exemplary and without fault: She saves a patient in surgery by administering a precordial thump (the two senior surgeons with her at the table apparently forgetting this potentially life-saving gesture), diagnoses a ruptured brain aneurysm in time to save a rich young man, and takes call for days on end without dropping. I do wish she weren’t such a superwoman; you don’t have to be perfect to be a great doctor, even if you are just a woman.

 

Her big struggle is to convince Dr. Gillian, when she finally ends up on his service, that women can be not just doctors but surgeons, and very good ones, and that he should accept her as a surgical resident next year. She is slowly succeeding at this endeavor, natch, but in the meantime, long hours at the hospital are cooling her ardor for Tom. Then, lo and behold, she meets wealthy Lance Hart, who is almost the only man in the book neither a doctor nor a patient. He’s a lawyer, and he sweeps her off her feet with flowers and candy, and instantly Jane is “acting like a sixteen-year-old with her first corsage”—meaning exactly as she did toward Tom when he first caught her eye. She’s swooning over Lance in a familiar and sickening way: “Oh, Lance, Lance! her heart sang, over and over again. Kiss me again, Lance darling! Don’t ever let me go!” Jane may be a great doctor, but she is a little kid in affairs of the heart.

 

The rub is that Lance is not wild about her being a surgeon, and is pressing her to dump surgery and join his mother’s convalescent hospital, where wealthy women go to take a little break. Jane has serious doubts: Could she give up her dream “of helping people who needed her desperately because, too often, there was no other doctor to attend them, or a doctor who cared? Could she be happy working with patients who didn’t need her, who didn’t really need any doctor?” In the last chapter, Dr. Gillian admits he was wrong about women doctors and offers Jane a spot in surgery under him next year—as we knew all along he would. Tom has dropped out of sight long ago, and now all she needs to do is wangle a ring from Lance to make her life complete—which he is suggesting she will only get if she takes the job at the convalescent home.

 

To author Adeline McElfresh’s credit, she never pretends that Jane is anything but immature in her feelings toward her men. With Tom, “falling in love with him, or thinking herself in love, had been natural.” And nothing changes when she and Tom drift apart and she tumbles for Lance. “It was easy to forget that she had thought herself just as deeply in love with Tom Waycross as she was, now, with Lance. It has been different between her and Tom. This was real,” McElfresh writes, and we can feel the sarcasm in the words. My beef, though, is that both relationships and Jane’s feelings are handed to us on a platter: We witness few conversations, shared activities, or anything that would show why Jane feels as she does. But perhaps that’s part of the writer’s plan, keeping us minimally invested in these relationships to help us feel that neither man is truly right for Jane.

 

The ending is the most shocking I’ve encountered in a VNRN, but this is the first in a series of six books chronicling the life and loves of Dr. Jane Langford, so we can only assume that Jane gets herself straightened out in Doctor Jane, the next installment. The writing is steady, if not particularly stylized or amusing or campy, and the story is good enough. Again, it would have made for a more thoughtful book if Jane hadn’t been Superman in a dress, and nothing in the story stands out to make this a great book. But it’s an easy, pleasant read, good enough to make me interested in finding out what happens next.

Calling Dr. Jane

Book 3 of 6
By Adeline McElfresh, ©1957

She was in love with her future husband, and Doctor Jane Langford eagerly prepared to join him at his remote African medical mission station. But then Doctor Paul Hamlin arrived to take over Jane’s busy practice. And as they worked side by side, the darkly handsome young doctor made no secret of his growing desire for Jane, his determination to keep her for himself. As Jane’s warm but errant heart responded to Doctor Paul she was faced with the greatest challenge she had ever known … Against the background of the busy, hectic world of modern medicine is told this challenging story of a young, beautiful woman’s search for truth and honesty.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Being short and dumpy may have its compensations but I don’t know what they are.”

“So long as there is one person in the world, there will be senselessness.”

 

“There ought to be a law against you.”

 

REVIEW:

Having spent very little time with Dr. Jane Langford and Bill Latham, her fiancé, in Doctor Jane, I had hoped we might get to see them together in Book 3 of the Doctor Jane series. But no—on page one, Bill has been in Africa doing missionary work for the past three months. Back in Halesville, Indiana, Dr. Paul Hamlin, a refugee from New York, has stepped onto the scene, and is supposed to take over the practice from Jane, oh, about now. But Jane just hasn’t yet bought that plane ticket. And now Bill is getting letters from Jane, and “something was there, between the lines.” Oh, no, Mr. Bill!

 

Jane starts off by protesting too much—and soon she’s up to her schoolgirl-crush usual, swooning over Paul. And then, before too long, Jane is kissing him and picking out a new house for them to live in after they’re married, the fickle wench. Meanwhile, there are strange goings-on: An unnamed doctor refused to see a woman with appendicitis because she was poor, and the woman nearly died … a strange, overly wired man barges into Jane’s office looking for Paul … later that same night, the local druggist is bashed on the head and killed, but all his money is still in the drawer … someone is prowling around outside Jane’s house at night, looking in the outbuildings …

 

For the most part, this book is incredibly delightful. The writing is amusing and interesting, and the little, sharp details that Adeline McElfresh tosses in almost off-handedly create a brilliantly realistic picture; at times I wondered if certain passages weren’t an actual diary of someone’s day rather than a fiction story, they felt so true. Most of the time we are out and about with Jane, through the various hospitals and homes and doctor’s offices, meeting a fairly substantial population of named patients and hospital staff. In some books, these hordes of characters can become overwhelming, but here, we get enough story about some patients that we easily remember them when they pop up again later, while others drop quietly away, serving as a quiet demonstration of Jane’s reach throughout the community and its importance to her.

 

The problem, as has been with the first two Dr. Jane books, is Jane’s utter lack of maturity when it comes to her love life. She falls like a ton of bricks for men we’ve barely met, and even after she’s engaged to Paul, we still don’t get to know him very well. Rather, what sticks is the quick observations of the things Paul doesn’t like, which also happen to be the things Jane loves: “Paul said they were medieval not to have an office nurse, as well as a secretary,” “Paul frankly admitted that he had no idea country doctors got out and around so early,” “he thinks we’re pretty small potatoes,” “no wonder Paul found Halesville dull sometimes.” These little droppings never bode well, and you won’t be surprised to learn that they weren’t wrong here, either.

 

The mystery of the book is not at all surprising when it eventually unfolds—which it does in two lightning-fast pages at the end, too fast to follow easily—and the red herrings that had been so convincing as they appeared are just as convincingly disposed of. Adeline McElfresh is a top-notch writer and a real joy when she is at the top of her game, as she is here. It’s just Jane’s lack of any sense whatsoever when it comes to a pretty face that misses the mark. I keep hoping that as Jane gains more experience with boys—she’s now had four beaux—she will wise up some, but so far, no such luck. Let’s hope that her next stop, Africa, proves she’s learned a trick or two.

Dr. Jane’s Mission

Book 4 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1958

Cover illustration by Bob Abbett

 

Dr. Jane Langford went to Africa eager to join the man she loved and help him in his dedicated work among the natives. The tiny medical mission seemed secure and peaceful, but as the days passed, Jane learned that the strange and evil powers of the witch doctors had been turned against the hospital and all in it—powers that Jane began to suspect might be stronger than modern medical knowledge!

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Sidonie turned from the window to her patient, saw that the brown-lashed eyelids were just a fraction raised. A most unromantic fraction, but then, when is coming out of anesthesia romantic? Not even the class’s glamour girl could look sexy while full of cyclopropane.”

 

REVIEW:

When last we saw Dr. Jane, she had thrown off the shackles of a corrupt, smooth doctor and fled Indiana to be with her then-fiancé, Rev. Bill Latham, who had set off on a mission into the deepest heart of Africa. Now, as the book opens, the time has flown, and she and Bill have been married for seven blissful months. Jane has, of course, thrown herself into her work with complete abandon, though she’s not entirely won over by Africa. “She simply did not understand these people,” she is thinking to herself in the first chapter, upset that an obstetrics patient’s great-grandmother has attempted to administer a witch doctor’s potion after a difficult delivery. “Their social and spiritual mores, their bewitchery— She shook her head.”

 

That said, though, author Adeline McElfresh does a more than respectable job, particularly considering the times, of imbuing her African characters with dignity and personality, to a degree that I’ve not seen before in a VNRN. The African countryside is likewise presented with a painterly lushness that makes you feel that you are there—and more importantly that Jane is there, which again differs from other African VNRNs (see Jungle Nurse, Congo Nurse, and Bush Hospital) in which the heroine might be working in Cincinnati, for all the background we see.

 

Since this is supposed to be a romance novel and our heroine is married, we can all but see the bull’s eye on poor Bill’s back. Nonetheless, I was thrilled at the spectacular way he departed the scene; it was so fantastic that although poor Jane is all but prostrate with grief, it’s hard to refrain from giggling. But even with Jane back on the market, she is just not very good at love—and this has been a major flaw with the Doctor Jane series. In fact, the next gentleman she tumbles for, Tom Radcliff, basically kisses her out of the blue one day, and then then next thing we know, she’s thinking, “She did love him—of course she did!” and planning her trousseau.

 

But she’s about as lackluster about Tom (her second boyfriend of this name, in case you’re keeping track at home; see Dr. Jane, Interne) as we are—in fact, we’ve barely met the man—which again is not surprising for the Doctor Jane series. For with Jane, she’s either swooning like a 12-year-old at a Justin Bieber concert or approaching her beloved as she would a nail trim. Fortunately, romance is not the center of this book, and the vast majority of the time we are wandering around Africa with Jane, looking on as she cares for her patients with the unusual diseases or settings as we would expect to find in rural Africa of almost 60 years ago.

 

As the pages at the back of the book grown increasingly few and the book shows little intention of going anywhere, Jane suddenly, quite literally in mid-sentence, decides she’s through with Africa and can’t marry Tom. It’s just two pages for her to break his heart and book her passage on a boat down the river, and now we are free to pick up the fourth installment, appropriately titled Dr. Jane Comes Home. One of her patients, a reporter named Mike Riley, has preceded her to Halesville, so we shall not at all be surprised to find her taking up with him in that tome. But as these books pile up, I begin to lose heart that Jane will ever find a relationship that shows any of the intelligence and maturity that she displays in every other aspect except her love life. But overall, her competence, aplomb, and adventures make this book worth reading on its own.

Dr. Jane Comes Home

Book 5 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1959

 

Woman or doctor? When beautiful, raven-haired Dr. Jane Latham returned to her hometown after her brief, tragic marriage she planned to devote the rest of her life to her profession. She was Jane Latham, doctor, she told herself. She had ceased to be Jane Latham, woman. But when Dave Riley, internationally famous newspaperman, came into her life he had other ideas. He begged Jane to renounce her vows and join him in his own cosmopolitan, easy-going life of fun and travel. Lonely, confused, filled with the ardor of youth, Jane Latham’s effort to deny her woman’s needs now met its sternest test.

 

GRADE: B

 

REVIEW:

I’m not sure what book the person who wrote the back-cover blurb (above) read, but it wasn’t the one I did. Maybe all that is forthcoming in the next (and final) book of the series, Dr. Jane’s Choice. In Dr. Jane Comes Home, it seems to be two years since her husband Bill died—done in by a crocodile in Africa—and one since she returned home to Halesville, Indiana, to resume her general practice. Journalist Dave Riley, whom she met in Africa before she left, has come with her, ostensibly to write an article about her but staying on because he loves this small town that much. Oh, and Jane too, but he’s waiting to spill the beans on that little secret, out of respect for her mourning.

 

Basically this book follows Jane as she manages patients and disasters, sheds an occasional tear over poor dead Bill, and otherwise snoops on minor Halesville characters old and new. A cast of more than 50 named people populate this story, which can be a bit confusing, but otherwise it’s a gentle, meandering story. At the end of the book Dave is in a serious car accident, which of course brings Jane’s latent love for him to the fore with her usual sappy “Oh, Dave, Dave—” which she has sighed again and again for every man who has passed through her heart, much to my increasing exasperation. We’ll see what dilemmas this new relationship brings to her in the final book.

 

It’s a pleasant story, but it doesn’t have much to offer: No offerings for the Best Quotes section; no real growth in Jane’s character; no interesting dilemmas, career or personal, for her to work out. It’s just more of Jane. Which, again, is nice enough—she’s smart, competent, independent, and strong—but unless you’re already this deep into the series and feel compelled to see it through, this book doesn’t really have much to offer.

Dr. Jane’s Choice

Book 6 of 6

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1961

Cover illustration by John W. Scott

 

To hundreds of thousands of readers, Doctor Jane Langford (later briefly married to the Reverend Bill Latham) is the most beloved heroine in all medical romance literature. Sternly incorruptible, but often hesitant as she chooses what is right and what is desirable—a gifted surgeon and general practitioner, but a woman first and foremost—Doctor Jane strikes an answering chord in every reader’s heart, for Jane is more than a dedicated professional, she is a woman needing masculine strength and love. In this present novel, Jane is faced with the most important choice of her life—how she reaches that choice makes for one of Adeline McElfresh’s most engrossing novels.

 

GRADE: B+

 

BEST QUOTES:

“Don’t you talk her right arm off, Henry. She might need it in surgery in the morning.”

 

“She wanted to share his life, divide herself between being Mrs. Dave Riley and Dr. Jane Latham.”

 

REVIEW:
When we last left Dr. Jane Langford Latham, she was mourning her husband, Bill, killed in Africa by a crocodile, and I am not kidding. She thinks she’s falling for reporter Dave Riley, whom she first met in Africa and who followed her home to Halesville, Indiana, so as to write and wait for her to come around. But Jane isn’t sure, because she really, really loved Bill. So she takes a job at the nearby City Hospital—where she did her residency, by the way (see Dr. Jane, Interne)—as director of outpatient medicine.

 

In the course of her work, she discovers that a local woman who lives in the seedy part of town performs abortions, and goes on the warpath, declaring that she will “not stop until that woman is found, arrested, jailed.” Perhaps not coincidentally, a young pregnant woman from that same neighborhood is found drowned, and now the book turns into a mystery story. Whodunnit? Well, this local reporter, Charley Lewis, takes up the case, and the book is divided between following Jane and her patients, and Charley in his attempts to track down the girl’s killer.

 

I could go into more detail about the case and Jane’s success as a doctor despite her gender, but it’s not really important, and if you didn’t figure out what Jane’s Choice is going to be at the beginning of the last book, Dr.Jane Comes Home, then I won’t spoil it for you. The central question for the reviewer and the reader is, should you read these six books? The problem is that they are neither good enough to make the answer a clear yes, nor bad enough to make it an emphatic no. I always appreciate the quiet competence of the writing, which is occasionally humorous, and here we find a little inside joke: “If you two will excuse me, I’ve got Elizabeth Wesley’s new book. About doctors,” says the wife of Dr. Warren, her former attending in Dr. Jane, Interne. (Elizabeth Wesley is, of course, a pen name of Adeline McElfresh’s!)

 

The books are interesting, but they don’t have a lot of zest or camp to give them sparkle. I enjoyed Jane, but six books about her is a bit much, considering that the format or story of every book was essentially the same: All about Jane and her daily life, and then at the end, a big decision, usually more or less out of the blue, about some man, the “romance” being almost irrelevant to the rest of the book. The mystery that pervades the plot of this book is not a first for the Dr. Jane series—see Calling Dr. Jane—but it’s a bit of a distraction from what is supposed to be the central point, i.e. Jane. So if you don’t have a better book to reach for, go ahead and make the investment in Dr. Jane, but don’t expect her to leap off the page and dazzle you. She’s much too sedate for that.

Kay Manion, M.D.

By Adeline McElfresh, ©1959

For the first time in her life, Kay Manion was running away, driving alone cross-country, fleeing her position as a surgeon in a large California hospital. The young and beautiful doctor could not face the thought that a moment of weakness had endangered a patient’s life—or that the man she loved, Dr. Frank Silvester, was infecting her with his own self-serving attitude toward medicine. But when the floodwaters of a raging river suddenly stranded Kay in the ravaged town of Woodbine, she could run no longer. In the midst of terrible human disaster, she had to prove her worth as a doctor. Forced to choose between a love she could not forget and a new love she could not bring herself to trust, Kay learned how foolish a woman’s fears could be, and how wise her heart.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Since when have pain and illness and death recognized office hours?”

“I’ll bet when he takes my pulse I’ll really register!”

“That was good—‘Good,’ Kay said.”

“She was, first of all, a doctor. First a doctor, then a woman—”

“Her heart plummeted to the toes of her pumps.”

“If you don’t stop talking I am going to pop a thermometer under your tongue.”

“You can’t believe that, Kay. You’re no dewy-eyed teen-ager, you’re a doctor, sweetheart—you know love is strictly biologic.”

“A surgeon pitting his skill against time realizes that time has snatched his patient’s life and is running away with it and he doesn’t dare make one swift, reckless plunge to catch up. If he does, if in his haste the hand holding the scalpel, the fingers tying a ligature, or handling a clamp—as hers had—God—please God—”

“Perhaps she needed to get away from strictly surgery for a while, perhaps that had been a part of her trouble. She had heard it argued that surgery was not for a woman. Pediatrics, definitely. And o.b., internal medicine. But not the long tedious grind that was surgery.”

“Didn’t it give her a turn, sometimes, to open people up? He wan’t right sure that he approved any such shenanigans, looks as though if God had wanted such things done he’d have put a zipper in.”

REVIEW:
Kay Manion, M.D., is fleeing California in her red Jaguar. Like all VNRN heroines who flee home, she’s running from a terrible tragedy: While in surgery, she starts thinking about her miserable love life and misses the call for a clamp from the senior surgeon. An artery spurts for an extra moment or two until she is called back to earth—but “in that infinetismal span of time before the strength she willed came back into her hands, had Harvey Webster’s chance for life been snatched from him?” In the throes of despair, Kay’s “heart and her whole future crumbled and trampled beneath her own foolishness,” she flings her belongings into a bag and heads out of town, before it’s even known whether Mr. Webster is going to pull through. (This is the second VNRN I’ve read where an extra second of hemorrhage convinces the heroine that she’s a murderer; see also Surgical Nurse by Florence K. Palmer.)

Stopping at a gas station in Indiana for directions, the friendly fella there warns her under no circumstances should she stay on Route 50, because there’s a huge flood coming. But when she gets to the intersection where she’s supposed to turn, she’s busy ruminating over that fateful day and biting her lip “until the salty taste of blood was there,” so she just keeps on going. Even as the water gets higher and she has to drive on flooded roads, it never crosses her mind that maybe she ought to turn around. Until she’s crossing this rickety bridge and it collapses under her.

She’s saved by a couple of locals, but now she’s stuck in this backwater, because the bridge was the only way out. But they can always use another doctor, and before long she’s helping with disaster management. She always seems to be seconds away from hysteria, though; Harvey Webster is never far from her thoughts, of course, but even when she’s in the middle of treating patients, she’s still hysterically obsessing: “Kay opened her mouth to ask why hadn’t the Davidsons gotten out while they could, then closed it, the words unspoken. Why didn’t people, herself included, do a lot of things? If she had paid attention to her driving she wouldn’t be here, she would be headed east on 50, far from flood-drowned southern Indiana by now. If she hadn’t followed her foolish heart until even the marrow in her bones was weary, if she hadn’t fallen in love with Frank Silvester the instant their eyes met that day in Dr. Frank’s cubbyhole of an office—she withdrew the needle from Evy’s hip, straightened.” This woman is a nervous breakdown or a malpractice lawsuit, or both, waiting to happen. Fortunately, she can turn it down a notch after page 50, when she finally calls home and finds out that Harvey Webster is going to be all right. The wise old doctor she talks to tells her that she was running not just from Harvey Webster—“It was Frank, too,” she thinks. “And—and her—”

You see, back in California she is engaged to one of those ubiquitous young doctors hoping to set up an office catering to neurotic rich women, apparently not recognizing that his fiancee is, perhaps more than anyone, in need of his services. To develop his clientele, Frank spends a lot of nights out club-hopping and being seen at all the fashionable spots, and poor Kay has been at the verge of exhaustion trying to keep up with him and still get up early for surgery in the morning. But on her midwestern detour she meets steady, dependable Chris Buford, publisher of the local newspaper. For some reason, he falls for her, and now Kay has another reason to anguish endlessly and speak with italics and em dashes: “Chris, I—Oh, Chris, please! I—I don’t know!”

The town is predictably on the verge of going under in the flood, but relentless sandbagging by the townspeople saves it, and there is much rejoicing. The strain, however, is too much for the elderly doctor, who is felled by the hard work: “Pinching the doubt in the bud she found a pulse in the muscular hairy wrist, with an eye on the sweeping second hand of her watch counted … seventy-nine…eighty…eighty-one, and it was a minute. Eighty-one! Oh, God—” Before she completely freaks out, someone ought to remind her that 81 is a normal pulse. So Kay has to stay on to help, and six months later, the old doc is better and hoping she’ll stay permanently. But there’s a rumor going around town about Chris and a beautiful music teacher, who is soon sporting a diamond. Kay flees home to California without finding out the truth of the situation—clearly she hasn’t learned anything at all—and we’ve got 20 more pages, plenty of time to develop a subplot! Back at the hospital, the staff is gossiping that one patient declined surgery, “not if Dr. Manion was to do the operating,” and that she’s a tramp, and now the medical board wants to see her in a closed session. But another surgeon tells her that there is “a master plan behind the whole thing,” an attempt to drive her out of the hospital. Who—who would do such a thing? Oh, God—

Frankly, I’m torn over this book. Kay is a horrible doctor, unable to keep her mind on her work and needing to be talked in off the ledge on every other page. Though she does seem to be a magnet for disaster, the amout of emotional drama she wrings from even ordinary events is seriously psychotic. The camp factor is turned up to eleven, and though it does offer up numerous laugh-out-loud moments, it can feel overdone at times and leave you rolling your eyes at yet another self-absorbed diatribe. I did enjoy the fairly realistic descriptions of surgery and the red Jag—before it drowned, anyway—but this book is a roller coaster of amusement and exasperation. I think it’s worth reading—aloud, preferably, to a group of like-minded friends—but be prepared for a wild ride, on a rickety, collapsing bridge.