Nurse in Spain

By Diana Douglas, pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter, ©1975

Cover illustration by Allan Kass

Lovely young Fran Kelly had accepted a transfer to the American Army base at Coronado, hoping for an easy tour of duty and a  much-needed rest. Almost at once Spain began to work its magic. Perhaps it was the presence of handsome Dr. Des Walton which made the country seem so wonderful. Or was it Mario Vallejo, the landed aristocrat and famous matador who showed her the most fascinating places in town? But Des kept brooding over some secret in his past, and Mario was involved in activities Army intelligence frowned upon.  Confused by rumors of terror and violence, how could Fran choose between the two men? If her heart betrayed her, Fran would face a danger that could destroy her only chance for happiness ...

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“He should remember that he is a guest of Spain, not we of America.”

“They do not matter. They are tourists from the north who come here. German, Scandinavian, Dutch. Their own developers build for profit the concrete warrens they vacation in, and our government allows this because of the deutsche marks, the kroner, the guilders they spend here. Other than money, they bring nothing to Spain except the permissiveness of their own decaying society! They do not even bother to learn enough of our language to ask for their needs.”

REVIEW:

Lt. Frances Kelly is a surgical nurse who has just transferred to the US Army base in Coronado because “Spain was full of interesting places and people and things,” and besides, she’d been worked so hard in New Mexico she was about ready to drop. She is fluent in Spanish, and it goes without saying that she is a top-notch nurse. She has an excellent surgeon, Dr. Des Walton, to work with. He’s an emotionally wounded guy, scarred from Vietnam, where he had done an emergency splenectomy and nephrectomy on a good friend—only to find later that the patient had congenital absent kidney and so died in less than a week after his only kidney was removed. As Fran arrives, Des had just walked out of a similar operation, unable to go on, and gotten drunk. Fortunately the base commander, Major Bill Ryan, another surgeon, is forgiving, understanding Walton’s actions as the result of a neurosis, and doesn’t court-martial him; instead he pairs Fran with Des in the OR, thinking, “Des Walton was a man who needed a calm and reassuring girl just like her.”

Eventually, as you know it will, another identical case lands on Walton’s OR table with no other surgeons available. Walton is about to lose it when Fran calmly and reassuringly suggests that Walton make a midline incision and manually palpate for the good kidney before removing the bad one. It’s such a crazy idea, it just might work! Walton follows her suggestion and then, reassured of the second kidney, is able to complete the surgery. “It was you who gave me back my confidence,” Des tells her afterward. Another life saved! Now if only all war-related PTSD was so easily cured …

In the interim, Frances has gone to a bullfight and witnessed the most brilliant performance ever, by matador Mario Vallejo. She’d called, “Good luck!” to him before the match, shockingly—“norteamericanos do not usually do this,” she is told—and he’d sent her his cape to display during the fight. Major Joe Crane, a self-absorbed possessive ass she’s attended the fight with, tells her, ”You don’t know these people like I do. Vallejo wasn’t paying you any compliment when he gave you that thing. When they give any foreign woman a gift like that it’s because they want her. There’s no way they’d marry outside their own kind.” To her credit, Fran replies, “Really? So I’m flattered that he wants to go to bed with me! Thank you for explaining that, Joe.”

You will not be amazed to learn that Frances meets Matador Mario again in town, and he takes her to lunch, and out shopping, and to see flamenco danced for realz, by “a big woman. Even in her dress with its flashing skirt she looked far too heavy for a dancer. And she was no beauty now, though she might have been thirty years ago. Her features had grown too heavy, and the dark shadow of one of the faint moustaches Fran had noticed and disliked on older Spanish women at the corrida showed quite plainly on her upper lip.” But boy, can she dance! She is such an artist that people on the street, hearing the music inside the bar, which has been locked for this private performance, pound on the door, begging to be let in to watch. Matador Mario is a hero in Coronado, and Fran’s day with him is magical.  “It was like traveling around with one of the great American film stars at the height of his career. It was a thrill being with someone like that. It was just about the greatest thrill of her young life.” At the end of the day, when they are kissing passionately, “it occurred to Frances that she was in the process of being seduced by an expert. But that didn’t seem to matter …”

She keeps seeing him, much to the great consternation of Major Joe, who warns her to keep away from Matador Mario because “the name of the game is subversion!” Gasp! It seems that our matador muy suave is involved in a plot to overthrow the government and install a new king of Spain. Frances calls Mario to ask him about this and discovers that his home has been seized by the Guardia  Civil police force and that they are looking for Mario. Instantly she jumps into her car and speeds into town, warned only casually by the base guard to “watch it in town tonight. There’s rioting in town [with] Guardia Civil everywhere with submachine guns.” But have a good time, honey!

Indeed, arriving in town she finds several friends of Mario’s, including the flamenco dancer, have been shot dead. She avoids arrest by playing the dumb tourist, and finds Mario at the bullring with his pals. They jump into her car and flee the city, Mario curiously telling his chums, “If she should try to betray us, shoot her.” As the men are climbing out of the car to flee into the mountains on foot, Mario chooses this moment to propose: “Come to France with me, Fran. We will be married there in a little chapel we have on  Vallejo land. You will be the Countess Frances Vallejo y Carlos. And one day a distant relative of ours will rule all Spain.” Between the gunplay and the idea of being on the lam, she’s not exactly won over and decides, “That’s not for me.” She tells him she doesn’t really love him after all: “Fascination isn’t love. I’d never met anyone like you before. It was like meeting a famous star back home and being flattered and kissed because you admired him. And I did admire you. You were like a storybook lover. But that isn’t really love either, Mario.” So as he dashes into the mountains, Des Walton shows up, and she holds his hand—and tells him a half-truth about her day’s adventure. And that’s where the book ends.

This is actually one of the better Richard Wilkes-Hunter (aka Diana Douglas) books I’ve read. We know it’s him from the usual gratuitous reference to her “firm young body” in the shower, and only male VNRN writers overtly mention sex, as in, “I’m not accusing you of sleeping around with the guy,” or in the discussion of Spanish women as mistresses or whores. But apart from denigrating remarks about Spanish women, which reflects a sexism demonstrated equally toward American woman (as when Frances is told by Mario, “Politics in Spain were not for women”), I really didn’t find anything terribly racist in this book, unlike Flight Nurse, which has a lot of similarities to this book, like the matador who is an accomplished lover working to overthrow the Spanish government. Neither book allows the heroine to pair up with the Spaniard, but at least here Frances takes Mario seriously as a boyfriend, even if in the end he is disqualified. The story moves along well and Frances has no obvious foibles—she hates the domineering Joe Crane and makes it plain to him that she does, she takes risks, she speaks her mind, she’s a great nurse. There’s nothing really special about it, apart from the unusual ending (all of which I have not revealed here), but it is a worthwhile bit of armchair travel.

Doctor Geyer’s Project

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1967

Doctor Warren Geyer desperately needed money to help him carry out the research project that was so dear to his heart, and the rick businessman Rory McMurtry was willing to supply it. But Mr. McMurtrey had a beautiful daughter who was interested in Doctor Geyer. Were there going to be awkward conditions attached?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“Rory had never had much patience with what he termed ‘serviceable women,’ no matter how clever and competent they might be. He liked women to be decorative, and when they were he could forgive much.”

“Engagements are like promises and pie-crusts, made to be broken! Most marriages can be wrecked, if only one thinks about it a little. It shouldn’t be difficult!”

REVIEW:

Nurse Hilary Oakworth is “about the best and most enthusiastic staff nurse in the whole hospital,” “friendly, helpful … a crisp, competent young woman.” Unfortunately, however, she has two major burdens to carry: One is that her twin brother, Robert, had been apparently paralyzed in an accident in which, saving a child from being hit by a car, he was struck himself. There’s a surgeon in Austria, though, who has cured cases such as Robert’s, and Hilary is working like a dog, denying herself even such essentials as talcum powder and bath oil to save “even the odd sixpence” to finance Robert’s trip and treatment. The end result of this scrimping is that Hilary holds herself aloof from the other nurses so as not to be tempted by the spontaneous outing to the movies, which makes the other nurses think “Hilary’s made of a cardboard heart.”

Our heroine’s other handicap is that she’s in love with Dr. Warren Geyer, “a man totally immersed in whatever it was which he worked at during every free moment in the laboratories of the hospital.” This in itself is a glaring warning sign—every VNRN aficionado knows that lab men are a cold, uncaring breed usually in possession of the emotional range of a turnip. Dr. Geyer asks Hilary out for coffee to discuss the book’s eponymous project, singling her out because “you don’t seem to gad about with the rest of the nursing staff very much, or indeed with anyone. You seem to live for your work, to mind your own business. To do what you can for your patients and leave it at that.” To behave, in short, exactly as Dr. Geyer does himself. “ ‘You make me sound all kinds of prig!’ Hilary protested, her color rising.” If a description that very accurately describes the man she’s in love with is so appalling to her, I do feel compelled to wonder why she’s attracted to him. She’s not alone in her feeling, though, as apparently half the nursing staff as well as one wealthy young volunteer, Francine MacMurtrey, are similarly smitten: “He always makes me want to take care of him! He seems so busy caring for everyone else that he doesn’t have time left over to bother much about himself. I think he needs someone to take an interest him,” Francine declares, bewilderingly believing that person to be her.

Dr. Geyer’s plan is to establish a research lab that will grow food without water or soil, and to create a diet based on these crops that will allow astronauts to be self-sufficient in space. He wants Francine’s businessman father Rory to fund his project, but is afraid that to seal the deal he will be forced to forge a more permanent partnership with the love-struck Francine. Hilary’s answer to this problem is that he should pretend to be engaged to her—and even get married if need be—to throw her off. In return, Dr. Geyer will pay for Robert’s surgery. Surprisingly, Dr. Geyer agrees to this scheme, though it’s not clear why marriage to Hilary would be preferable to marriage to Francine, and the plan goes off without a hitch.

Everything at the new clinic is progressing well, apart from the astronauts’ propensity to break out in rashes from their experimental diet. Hilary’s brother moves in to benefit from some buffing up before his surgery, and Francine’s disappointment in losing Dr. Geyer evaporates the minute she claps eyes on the handsome—and coincidentally even more helpless—Robert. “It drew her very heart-throb from her body. Never, she knew, had she felt like this in her life before. Never, she felt, would she feel like this about anyone else, no matter how long she lived or what happened to her.” So Dr. Geyer’s half of his  bargain with Hilary turns out to have been completely unnecessary. Rather than break off their sham engagement, however, Dr. Geyer instead gets pissy when a visiting doctor pays a little too much attention to Hilary. Accusing her of leading the doctor on and telling her that she’s making a fool out of herself for a man who is bound to dump her in the end, Dr. Geyer simultaneously infuriates Hilary and drops a few telling remarks about their bargain, which are overheard by Francine. Rushing to spill the beans to Robert under the impression that he will find this good news, she finds instead that Robert decides to refuse to have the surgery, bought as it is with money from the sale of his sister. When Hilary learns of Robert’s plan to quit the hospital immediately, she follows suit and tenders her resignation from both Dr. Geyer’s clinic and engagement.

With this shocking surprise before him, Dr. Geyer has a Dr. Higgins moment when he realizes that he’s grown accustomed to Hilary’s face, in the flattering fashion of self-absorbed emotionally challenged men. “She must be a very important person indeed in my life,” he thinks, and logically reasons that his upset at Hilary’s impending departure must mean he cares for her. Rushing to find her packing, he tells her, “Until today I’ve never thought of love except to tell myself it was a biological urge, something to while the time,” concluding, “I must love you.” Nothing else matters more than she does, he decides, except helping Robert, because he’s her brother—and this last is what brings Hilary to his arms.

The story is fairly perfunctory but not unpleasant. Hilary is a strong, capable woman, but her unswerving devotion to Dr. Geyer is never understandable to the reader. Clearly a longstanding theme in nurse novels and indeed in life is the one about the elusive man whom everyone wants falling for only you, but frequently the problem in VNRNs is that these unavailable men are seldom shy or insecure—forgiveable offenses—but are just completely devoid of emotion, making them completely unattractive to anyone with a shred of self-respect or confidence. This book is guilty of that sin, making the entire premise utterly baffling. The best reasons for reading this book are Hilary and Francine, and if it’s not the most compelling book, it’s perfectly serviceable.

Nurse’s Dilemma

By Hilda Pressley, ©1965

Sister Alys had been in love with Doctor Richard Kent for a long time—at a distance. Then she was appointed to the post of Home Sister, which would bring them into contact—not knowing that Doctor Kent considered that particular post a great waste of a trained nurse’s time.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“One tends to think that all teenagers are pop mad.”

“With a woman it’s different, even in our modern times. At least, it is with me. I still want the man to do the chasing. If he showed any sign, of course, I’d meet him halfway. But—well, you know, a girl has her pride and all that.”

REVIEW:

From the very first sentence, Nurse Alys Newton is desperately in love with Dr. Richard Kent. She’d run into him at the train station and had snagged the only cab right out from under his aquiline nose, and that plus the swanky fur coat she’d been wearing (dad’s rich) had made him look at her in anger and scorn. There  you have it, the stuff on which passion is built in far too many nurse novels. “It was ridiculous to feel this way, she told herself, about a man to whom she had not even spoken,” and the best thing we can say about this is that at least she understands her foolishness.

But over time she and Dr. Kent begin a speaking relationship. As she is promoted to Home Sister, which is a position that involves supervising all the student nurses as well as filling in around the hospital when they’re short-staffed, she sees a lot of him—and he uses these opportunities to tease her about her cushy job: “What, if I may ask, is someone as  young as you—and obviously a good nurse—doing wasting her time in a position like Home Sister? Surely it’s a job for either the middle-aged or work-shy?” Now he is in her thoughts constantly. “His tall figure striding along the main corridor or across the quadrangle, his uncompromising stare, his way of saying exactly what he liked, and which never failed to spark anger in her.” Ah, true love!

They spar at every meeting, with varying degrees of friendliness, which causes Alys a lot of pain. To her credit, Alys does understand the silliness of the situation “She must be crazy to love this man! Why did she? she fumed inwardly,” after he’s made fun of her again. “It couldn’t be the real thing, anyway. She  barely knew him. It just couldn’t be any more than a superficial attraction.”

In the interim, small items go missing around the nurse’s dorm, and Alys’s suspicious fall on the new nurse, Edna Farrell, who is unpleasant and rude to Alys, though an excellent nurse. Edna had a tragic childhood, spent in orphanages and foster homes, so Alys tries hard to win Edna’s trust. Alys also catches a night nurse with a pair of missing hosiery in her hands, and nurse Halesworth says she’s just found them in the bathroom—indeed, all the missing items turn up eventually. Those of us who have read The Case for Nurse Sheridan understand exactly what is going on here, and indeed the detective who’s brought in to crack the case starts throwing around the K-word: kleptomania! But Alys, for all her suspicions, tells the detective when Edna is caught with a stolen nightie, “What I do know is—Nurse Farrell is no thief.” Eventually the story comes out that Nurse Halesworth, an orphanage friend of Edna’s, is indeed a klepto, and Edna has been returning all the ill-gotten gains.

This subplot very handily absorbs a large chunk of the story, as does Alys’s dating Dr. Ben Chalmers, who is really very nice but not a man she loves. When Ben eventually proposes, we haul out of the closet the threadbare question of whether you should marry a man you like if you can’t have the man you love: “Ben needed her. She sensed it. He needed her far more than Richard did, who indeed did not seem to need her at all, did not appear even to want her friendship. She needed love, needed to feel cared for, to feel sure of someone. And here, in Ben, it was being offered to her. They could fill a need in each other.” You screw up your courage to face her eventual acceptance of his proposal, as per the custom of the county, but we are in for a pleasant treat: As Ben pops the question at a swank restaurant, Richard strolls in with a beautiful but snippy nurse on his arm—you fear the deal is sealed—but Alys turns him down, saying they do not feel “an all-consuming passion for each other.” She’s resigned herself to becoming a vinegary careerist nurse—and about to resign her position as well to get away from the pain of seeing Richard—when the inevitable happens, and you know what that is.

If the prose here is not sparkling or campy, it’s a pleasant enough story that easily passes the time. I appreciated that Alys is self-aware enough to see the silliness of her crush even if she is helpless to shake it off—haven’t we all been there? Pleasant enough and not especially annoying—qualities that make for a fairly decent nurse novel, such as the one we have in Nurse’s Dilemma.

Prodigal Nurse

By Harriet Kathryn Myers, ©1963

All her life, Nurse Judy Austin had regarded Graystone Memorial Hospital as a haven, a place where problems were solved and lives set straight again. But suddenly all the comfort of the hospital turned to coldness; for the very doctor who had courted her so amorously was now accusing her of negligence and the death of a patient. How could Judy fight to protect her reputation as a nurse when the truth might ruin her last chance for happiness?

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“He’s naturally a wolf, like very other man you’ll ever know. But that’s the nature of the beast, and it’s up to girls like us to tame that savage nature.”

“‘I won’t bite you,’ he teased. ‘If I do, I’ll warn you in advance.’”

“I’ll take him. Even if you don’t want him. I know how to handle him. With care and feeding—and gentle training—he can yet be a wonderful man, and an M.D. to be proud of.”

“Never let a man think you needed him; it was like money or fishing, you never got either if you needed them.”

“I always run a temperature when you’re near me, and I hope I always will.”

REVIEW:

I’ve looked forward to reading this book for quite some time, drawn largely by the excellent and unusual cover illustration. What I found behind it, though, did not deserve my interest. In this fairly perfunctory  book, Nurse Judy Austin is a cynical, bitter young woman who, having recently graduated from nursing school, already hates her new career. She’s fled to a tropical island for a vacation where she contemplates her options with her best friend, Lora Kneeland. “Are you really going on with it?” Lora asks. “Can you really endure what they do to you? The hours without sleep? The doctors who either don’t know, or don’t care, or both? The pay—good lord, the pay! They want girls. They actually get up in front of you and tell how badly they want girls in nursing, smart, dedicated girls, and then offer you a salary you couldn’t live on! We must have had holes in our heads” But—but—what about our dedication to a higher cause? Actually Judy doesn’t have that either, having lost her ideals working alongside the hospital’s resident quacks.

Lora’s answer is for Judy to snag the ubiquitous handsome, rich society doctor. “You’ve got Warren Blackmarr down here all to yourself and you’d better take advantage of it while you can,” Lora advises. “You hook Warren Blackmarr in the next two weeks. You get him wrapped up in orange blossoms before you leave here.” But—but—what about True Love? “Would it kill you to fall in love with a man as rich as Warren Blackmarr?” It seems like it would, though. On her next date with Warren, she feels only self-conscious, “somehow contrived and dishonest.” “She was conscious of a part she had to play, and an interest Lora warned her to pretend when she wasn’t sure yet what she felt in her heart.” Though it’s pretty clear, when he dismisses her deep attachment to her family, what she ought to feel. So she flees the island early and comes home, on the plane sitting next to a poor sap of a man. He expresses concern at how troubled she looks, but “she was old fashioned, a square about many things: about talking to strangers, tricking men into marriage, loving her family and wanting to stay near them.” So she gives him the cold shoulder—besides, “most of all was the white suit. A white suit? A white suit in the dead of winter!” What a loser! But in the airport he’s looking so lost, she offers to share her cab with him. When she arrives at her house, she finds that Dad has dropped with a heart attack in the hallway and Mom is running a fever. In ten pages Dr. Guy Forrest—you knew he was—has cured Dad, and Mom too, and best of all bought some black clothes. He’s quickly adopted by the entire Austin clan, which he deeply appreciates, having grown up an orphan, so he’s ensconced most nights at the dinner table.

Dr. Warren, meanwhile, has come home to chase Judy some more—but before long he’s revealed himself for the wolf that he is when he offers her not a ring but an apartment!! She sprints home, berating herself because “she’d thought he loved her,” suddenly, when she’d had only doubts before—but the clouds break apart with equal alacrity and she is at once aglow with the knowledge that “she loved Guy Forrest. She had always loved him, from the first,” again another surprise to the reader.

With 40 pages left to go, we end up in the OR with Dr. Blackmarr and the other hospital quack, Dr. McLenton, who manage to assassinate a patient who’d come in for a routine hysterectomy, and the duo attempt to throw the OR nurses—Judy among them—under the bus for the death, despite the nurses’ valiant but futile attempts to nudge the surgeons in the right direction, away from the major arteries in the pelvis. The hospital chief, prodded by Guy, exonerates the nurses and insists the surgeons resign, but Dr. McLenton goes berserk and attempts to shoot Guy in the parking lot, just as Judy is rushing to him to tell him she loves him. A more successful murderer when wielding a scalpel than a handgun, Dr. McLenton gets Judy instead, and she is saved by the only competent surgeon in the building, Dr. Guy Forrest.

Awakening after apparent weeks—it must have been one big bullet—Judy undergoes yet another epiphany and finds that the world of medicine suddenly has meaning. “At last she was truly one of them. She had found herself at last because she knew she owed her life to dedicated doctors, devoted nurses, all working together. She  believed in them now, and what nursing stood for, wanted to be one of them after this long time of doubt and indecision.” Jesus rays shining down around her, all she has to do now is softly whisper Guy’s name and he appears before her, so she can tell him she loves him and we can close the book.

An ordinary novel for the most part, Prodigal Nurse swivels like a top in its positions: Does Judy love Warren? Does Warren love Judy? Does Judy love Guy? Does Judy love nursing? Depends on what page you’re on. Its finest point is that the usually righteously square Judy, who cannot tolerate fashion faux pas or an indecent proposal that should have surprised her not a whit is suddenly brazen enough to chase Guy Forrest across a parking lot. But maybe that’s just more swiveling.

Paper Halo

By Kate Norway, pseud. Olive Norton, ©1970

Cover illustration by Bern Smith

Nurse Toffy [sic] collected men-friends easily, while her friend Nurse Clare was shy and fastidious. It was unfortunate that, because of a misunderstanding, the one man who attracted her gained the very opposite impression of Clare—and disapproved of her accordingly.

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:

“That’s the trouble with men: you have to watch what you ask for, because they’re only too ready to be little gentlemen and supply it.”

“I smiled at the front-row patients to show them I had them well in mind. Two of them smiled back; the rest went on studying my shoes in that disconcerting way they have.”

“I’d long since learned not to be surprised at the speed with which the grapevine assimilated facts, like an insect-eating plant gobbling up its prey.”

REVIEW:

I started this book and then had to put it down for a bit when I went on a long hiking vacation, and when I came back to it I couldn’t remember much of it, so I started over. How lucky for me that this is such a truly superlative book!

Nurse Clare Kennedy has actually been out of school for enough years that she has amassed a truly impressive body of experience. We watch her expertly staff a busy clinic and serve in a role more like that of a PA in the ED, making diagnoses, suturing wounds, and initiating treatment plans with complete skill, accuracy, and aplomb.

The only issue she has is that she is not impressed with the opposite sex. She’s had a couple of run-ins early on with boys who assaulted her in the name of love, and it’s left her pretty cool. Her roommate, Torfy, who is a more freewheeling type, tries to explain that kissing boys is perfectly acceptable, a hobby indulged in by “ordinary people. Like you and me, for example. Just people who enjoy petting in cars, that’s all. And a lot of perfectly ordinary and quite nice people do, you know. In fact they always did.” Clare is not buying it, however, especially after she is mauled again after the big nurse’s dance. “I’m not odd,” she tells Torfy, who clearly thinks otherwise. “But I just don’t want them to take it for granted that if I’m nice to them it means I want them to paw me.”

The only man she’s ever had eyes for, and the only gentleman she’s ever met, is Dr. Neil Sargent, who escorts Clare home after the big dance. But after their one brief drive, she doesn’t see him again for years. When they do next meet, he’s popping down to the ED to see a patient she’s requested help for from the covering doc—not realizing it’s her old heartthrob—just as Dr. Kenyon Fiske is pinning her down for her fourth assault. Clare manages to beat Ken away, but Neil, walking in as it is transpiring, thinks she’s pushing the doctor away because she’s embarrassed at having been caught in the clinch. He then looks with suspicion—a little too much, methinks—on her every interaction with anyone of the male persuasion. Clare’s a friendly person, too, so there’s always a copper sitting down to a cuppa in the ED after he’s hauled in an assault victim, or a resident to have lunch with at the end of a long night shift.

You know how it’s going to play out, and it does delightfully. The writing here is sharp, as in, “Sister folded away her smile,” and, “She slid a look at Torfy.” It’s written in the first person, and has a very amusing sense of humor, so at first I thought this book must have been written by the Marjorie Lewty, who gave us the excellent Town Nurse—Country Nurse, and though this book could be a sister to Lewty’s, it is a different author, but one who also penned another winner, Factory Nurse. I appreciated the realism of the hospital setting, such as when Clare “switched on the kettle and fetched the milk from the blood fridge”; the nurses I’ve known do enjoy serving popcorn in a bedpan. Clare is easily one of the most intelligent heroines I’ve ever met, and this book was sweet, smart, and much too short. Olive Norton has firmly established herself on my list of best VNRN authors, and I look forward to more of her books.

White Doctor

By Celine Conway, ©1957

Here is a hospital story with a difference, for it is set on a Burmese island where one white doctor and two nurses, with a native staff, waged a ceaseless war against tropical diseases, parasites and an utterly exhausting climate. Pat found it hard going in any case … but much more so when she fell in love with the doctor whose only feeling for her seemed to be intense irritation.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Your bed always looks like the aftermath of a dog-fight.”

“Marriage is still a good career, you know. Not so good as nursing, in my opinion—but the next best.”

“It is only the open heart that lets in magic.”

“There’s a lot to be said for having a nitwit for a wife. I married her because she was too dumb to know a tea-plant from a banana. I wouldn’t have her different;  keeps me amused and gives me a good opinion of my own mental equipment!”

“You’re cold and composed and very efficient, and I ask for nothing more in any nurse. But on the inside you’re still a bit of a woman, and that’s what it is that gives you headaches.”

REVIEW:

What do you do with the racism that is sometimes indigenous in a nurse novel written more than 50 years ago? In the past I have given it a disgusted snort, maybe even tacked up some passages in the Best Quotes section, not because they are best but because they are so ludicrous that they deserve to be ridiculed alongside campy exhortations that the nurse check what she’s done to the patient’s heart rate. But something happened to me as I read White Doctor, a book I expected to blow off with that same sneer. Maybe it’s the climate we’re living in lately, in which national political figures express similar sentiments (and only occasionally in more veiled language), where children are stolen from their families and locked in jails without adequate supervision, much less diapers or food. The distressing racism in these books is not antiquated as I had once naively thought they were, but are violently alive and thriving. I’ve decided that from now on every time I read one of these horrible sentences I will make a donation to an organization that combats racism. I’m starting off with a $100 donation to the Southern Poverty Law Center, and I’m going to have to be careful about which books I read too far out from payday.

The odd thing is that White Doctor is actually a sweet book overall, one that snuck up on me. It opens at a small hospital in what is now Myanmar, where two nurses—our heroine, Patricia Millay, age 22, and veteran RN Lisa Collett, 35—are working alongside Dr. Vincent, who at 50 is on the brink of jungle-induced collapse. He’s being replaced by Dr. Mark Bradlaw, a 34-year-old bachelor, who blows in like a thunderstorm, all full of fire and shouting.

Pat is barely out of her student days but applied for an overseas position in an attempt to outrun the heartache of being dumped after a year of dating by a young MD who out of the blue told her he was engaged to marry a woman he’d met on vacation a few months prior. “And here she was, after three months, studentship quickly forgotten because she had been accepted as assistant to Nurse Collett, and they were the only two white women in Molang.” She and Dr. Mark immediately get off on the wrong foot when he scolds her for being too friendly with one of the two white patients they have, a young man who was temporarily blinded by an explosion. After that, the two spar fairly regularly, if they do have some occasional friendly chats in his quarters. “She gave me back almost as good as she got, so I piped down,” the doctor recalls his and Pat’s early days together to a friend.

Soon Lisa starts with a cough, and then rapidly starts to dwindle in the best Ali MacGraw tradition. We should not be surprised, because after eight years in the tropics she is “ravaged.” But Pat suspects there’s something else underneath it, and as her feelings toward Mark inexplicably sweeten, she thinks she knows why. She tells Mark that Lisa is in love with Dr. Vincent and is pining away now that he’s returned to England. As Lisa’s case looks increasingly hopeless, Dr. Vincent turns up and installs himself at Lisa’s bedside, determined to make her well and take her back to England as his bride. At the same time, an old girlfriend of Mark’s, Fane Dering Ernston, turns up. She had been a nurse who had dumped Mark to marry a wealthy patient who had promptly died, and now she wants her old beau back. Because they are so short-staffed with Lisa being ill, Mark hires her, and now Pat becomes more depressed, torn as she is by jealousy.

It’s not hard to see where this book is headed, but overall it meanders there in a gentle, sweet fashion. Most of the book is spent following Pat around the countryside as she visits friends, and if not consequential or brilliantly written, the book is pleasant and enjoyable. The biggest problem I had with it—apart from the endemic  condescension toward the local folk—is that I never got over my initial dislike of the blustering, domineering Mark, who continues to be rather mean all the way through; on page 163 we are told, “However kind his tone there was hostility somewhere underneath it, even today.” This is a common problem with VNRNs that initially present the love interest as a jerk and then have the heroine slowly warm to him; seldom is the writer skilled enough to illustrate a plausible change in the man’s character or misunderstanding of it by the woman. I didn’t like him at the start, and hadn’t changed my mind at the book’s end. We are told that Mark’s ongoing meanness to Pat stems from his own jealousy of her, but how are we supposed to get past the fact that he has never been nice? Apart from this, however, White Doctor is surprisingly worth reading.  

Reluctant Nurse

By Anne Lorraine, ©1959

Nursing is a splendid career—but it must be chosen for the right reasons. A girl who is not suited to it, however hard she tries, might lead a more useful life elsewhere. That was Carol’s problem. Was she a born nurse? Should she return to dancing? Or would love and marriage provide a third way out?

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:

“You look so lovely when you’re annoyed, darling!”

“That is the  beauty of this life—you can always be pretty sure that, whatever your problem is, hundreds of other people are going through the very same trouble.”

“Whenever Doctor Foreday visits our hospital, pet, half the nurses run temperatures!”

REVIEW:

Carol Lloyd is the daughter of a very successful doctor who is kind of an asshole. He’s always brushing Carol off for more important things, and he makes it plain that he prefers her younger brother Stephen, who is destined to become a doctor the minute he was born sporting a penis. Carol, then, becomes housemaid and secretary to the pair, and studies dancing. The opening chapter, she’s performing a dance she has created herself (she even wrote the music, which includes violins, talented gal), and she’s sure to finally convince her father that she needs to pursue a career in dancing—but an emergency calls the doctor and Stephen from the audience—and then they suffer a car crash en route to the hospital. Pulled from a café where she’s was just offered a chance to be a big star by Kevin Knight, a talent scout who’d been in the audience, she flies to the hospital and finds Stephen already dead and Dad on his way out. On his deathbed, he forces Carol to promise to carry on the family tradition and go into medicine.

Bizarrely, she decides to chuck her big chance at success as a dancer and go into nursing, even though she’s terrible at it and hates it. Far too many pages of indecision ensue—should she drop out of nursing? How could she break her promise? Did Dad always think she would make a great nurse, but never mentioned it until that fatal moment? Kevin keeps popping up to take her dancing and pressure her to quit nursing, and also to marry him, because “I’m in love with the real Carol—the girl who danced her way into my heart.” Through it all everyone is reminding her how bad she is as a nurse, and she’s always dropping kidney basins and breaking thermometers. So she decides that she’s going to drop out after exams and go back to dancing, which somehow satisfies her promise even if she passes the exams—which she does, apparently by the skin of her teeth.

Except now—you guessed it—she’s back to waffling again: “Surely, by proving that she could be a nurse, she had more or less committed herself to fulfil her promise to her father to its ultimate end?” Meanwhile, she’s become sort of a sounding board to Dr. Alan Foreday, who likes to talk out his medical cases with someone who can’t contribute at all to the conversation. When he’s not blathering on while Carol silently listens, he’s snapping sharply at her on the wards for all her terrible gaffes, like speaking to him. “To her shocked amazement he frowned at her, and his voice, when he spoke, was curt to the point of rudeness.” Miserably for her future patients, she’s decided to forge ahead with nursing and give up dancing forever when the man who was driving the car that smashed into her father’s is brought in, and he needs a brain surgery that’s only been attempted once—by Dr. Foreday—and he’d failed—and it was on a woman he was in love with—

Foreday is about to refuse to do the surgery when Carol overcomes her hatred of the man and begs him to try, and completely out of the blue Dr. Foreday tells her he loves her, though he has not heard her speak more than ten sentences, and most of those were, “Yes, Doctor.” She then suddenly recognizes that she loves Dr. Foreday: “Now, with the knowledge of Alan’s love for her, and hers for him, she knew she wanted only one thing from life … to be with Alan, and to do what pleased him!” After that horrible scene, Carol is even more committed to being a bad nurse. Until Alan tells her that he really wants her to go back to dancing, because apparently that’s really what her father wanted her to do all along, he just had never mentioned it and had been incredibly patronizing about her dancing to her face. Alan just wants her to be happy: “I want you to be yourself—because that’s how I love you.” Next thing you know, a major producer is on the line offering her a part that will make her a permanent show biz legend! Slow curtain, the end!

It’s a pity that I read this book immediately after I finished Make up Your Mind, Nurse, because they both have the same formula, and it’s not a good one: The nurse is being forced to do something she doesn’t want to do, but should she keep with it? It’s not interesting, it’s not suspenseful, it’s not enjoyable—it’s just irritating. Right from the opening pages I wanted to smack Carol Lloyd upside the head, and there are 192 in total to wade through. If Carol was reluctant to become a nurse, you should be more reluctant to read this book.