Office Nurse

By Rebecca Marsh
(pseud. William Neubauer), ©1960

Gerry Staley, R.N. loved the sleek elegance of the society doctor’s office but her conscience told her there was more to nursing then caring for the imagined ills of the rich. Then, when diamond-in-the-rough Tom Covert demanded an answer and self-confident Dr. John Driscoll asked her to wear his ring, Gerry knew she must make the decision that would influence the rest of her life.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“Ho, for the old days, when the blacksnake whip could be summoned to teach you your duty.”

“Aren’t we a bit formal this morning? The first sir is acceptable, of course. It establishes your respect for my skill, my position, and my bankroll. But once you have established that, Staley, you mustn’t belabor the point.”

“Well, you don’t always look forty, Boss. On day like this, with that look in your eye, you look maybe thirty-nine.”

“The man should always be allowed to think he’s doing the chasing.”

“Ah, have a good cry, Staley; it’ll clean out the ducts just fine.”

“‘Will you tell me why so many men are so idiotic?’
“‘Girls,’ he explained solemnly. ‘They do that to us, for some reason.’”

REVIEW:
Gerry Staley is a 23-year-old nurse working in the posh office of fortyish Dr. John Driscoll. It’s a well-paying job and one that she enjoys, but at book’s open she is talked into helping a young man she knew growing up in the slums who has made a stupid mistake and robbed a jewelry store. She testifies for the young man’s defense, but this means that she needs to come clean with Dr. Driscoll, who is unaware of her upbringing on the wrong side of the tracks. Upon learning this about her, he magnanimously agrees to keep her in her position after “he checked up on you all over town before he graciously agreed to retain the best nurse he’s ever had”—though you’d think the fact that he’s worked alongside her for more than a year would acquaint him to her character. This is just the start of a long line of dominoes that tumble following this one seemingly in significant act in a plot that is fairly typical of author William Neubauer—not that there’s anything terribly wrong with that. 

Gerry is dating ambitious and successful salesman Tom Covert, but she has a crush on Dr. Driscoll, and apparently everyone in town knows it, including Tom. Nonetheless, she continues to see Tom, even though “he wasn’t John Driscoll, of course. He had neither John’s handsomeness nor John’s suave wit. Yet with Tom, at least, she could always be herself.” Interestingly, if Gerry likes him, everyone else in town thinks Dr. Driscoll is “a greedy, money-chasing, social-climbing guy.” The objection seems to be that he doesn’t take enough pro bono shifts: “The only time your fellow goes to the slums it’s a great big show,” Tom tells Gerry. “There’s the limousine sparkling like this bauble. There you are in a spanking fresh uniform and your red-lined cape. Everyone knows you’re there doing charity work. Only it isn’t charity work, because your fellow gets his compensation in the form of publicity.”

Dr. Driscoll seems to live up to the town’s idea of him when, in an attempt to rid himself of his girlfriend Iris Preston, who he feels is getting too serious, the good doctor asks Gerry to pretend that the two are engaged, and he’ll pay her to go out with him a couple times a week. As much as Gerry would love to be with Dr. Driscoll, she is outraged by his proposal. “Did you honestly think, Dr. Driscoll, that I’d help you play such a rotten trick on any woman?” she shouts. “What a strange, pathetic man you are!” She’s summarily fired, but has a new job in five minutes in the hospital emergency department.

Meanwhile, Tom is working on a plan to buy in on a local food distribution business, which he thinks he can leverage into great profits. But he needs $25,000 to swing the deal, and the bank will not lend him the money outright. He asks Gerry to use her connection with Iris, since her dad is also the bank’s president, to influence a positive decision on the loan. So now, with more free time on her hands, Gerry meets with Iris and puts in a plug for Tom’s business. Iris, though, insists on the truth about why Gerry isn’t working for Dr. Driscoll any more—and Gerry gives it to her. “And that, Iris thought weakly, would teach her to do less snooping in the future!” Iris agrees to promote the loan with her father and rushes out the door to see Dr. Driscoll, in a scene that is played offstage.

A few days later Gerry bumps into Dr. Driscoll in the ED, and he tells her that what he really wants is to start a free clinic, and has even purchased a building in the poor section of town; all his money-grubbing ways are so he can amass a pile of money to open the clinic. When Gerry tells Tom about this, he suggests that if Dr. Driscoll really wants to raise money for the clinic, he should undertake a fund-raising campaign, so Gerry suggests he run one, since he’s such a great salesman—and since it’s not likely he’s going to get the loan from the bank. If he succeeds at fund-raising, she suggests, he’s likely to get his seed money from other sources. Sure enough, the campaign is successful, Dr. Driscoll lends Tom the money, and Gerry goes back to work for Dr. Driscoll. Suddenly, though, Gerry is saying to an old friend, “Surely you don’t imagine for an instant that I’d marry Dr. John Driscoll? I’m fond of him, sure, but as a girl might be fond of a rather nice if strange older brother. Lord, it’s always been Tom.” News to us!

Everything ties up very nicely, as you imagine it will. The writing is wonderfully amusing, and there is a terrific character in the person of the Superintendent of Nurses, who has marshalled Gerry along with tough love through her training and now career, and the two regularly meet to trade witticisms, much to our benefit. Dr. Driscoll, also, has a marvelous way with words, à la another personal favorite, author Alan Jackson, who wrote as Rosie M. Banks. “There are times, Iris, and this is one of them, when a man wants the companionship of a full-blown woman,” he says in one lovely example of his eloquence. “Even the cave man was unhappy if there wasn’t a cave woman to grunt her admiration when he’d slain some prehistoric beast. Do grunt your admiration, there’s a pet.”

Gerry is a strong, determined, intelligent, hard-working, top-notch nurse, and not one to fall swooning into anyone’s arms; in fact, she is quite hard to get, right to the bitter end. The only trouble with this story is that you will at times struggle to keep up with the intricacies of the plot, as is customary with Mr. Neubauer, but that’s certainly no reason to shun his books. Rather, it’s a treat to see a VNRN writer who actually puts in an effort to construct a story that you haven’t read fifty times before, and in Office Nurse we have a smart, witty little gem that you could actually read several times and still get something more out of it every time.

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Penthouse Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1974
Cover illustration by Allan Kass 

Actually, it was a dream assignment—private duty nurse to wealthy Jim Orr in his lavish penthouse. But to Carrie Linden it meant only a chance to work with Ken Delaney, Jim’s doctor—a chance to be near the man she secretly loved. Perhaps then their friendship might grow into something more. But Ken treated her as just an old friend and a capable, dedicated nurse. But Dr. Michael Carlisle saw her differently, and Carrie, feeling so lonely, found herself accepting his persistent attentions. Soon she became more and more drawn to the suave and handsome doctor, yet the image of Ken still haunted her daydreams. Was she being a romantic fool to think that Ken would ever care for her? Or should she erase him from her life—and her heart?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“If he had known that all nurses aren’t fat and forty, he’d have cooperated long ago, right, Jim?” 

“Believe me, darling, I love you!”

REVIEW:
Nurse Carrie Linden is back in Chicago after two years at home in Bend, Oregon, caring for her terminally ill mother, who had finally succumbed to her disease. Carrie’s first stop, after that seedy hotel where she dumped her bags, is Dr. Ken Delaney’s office, where she hopes to get a glimpse of the heartthrob she left behind. “There was no reason to believe that Ken Delaney repeated her name in his daydreams like Carrie repeated his. Every day, every night—for two interminable and lonely years.” But here she is, cooling her heels in his lavishly decorated reception area, waiting for him to show up so she can beg him to marry her—no, wait, she just wants a job in his office where she can stare adoringly at him every single day. Amazingly, he remembers her with enthusiasm and takes her to dinner—and also invites his partner, Dr. Mike Carlisle, who has a cardiac patient who needs immediate specialized care. Ken warns Carrie, though, that he and the office receptionist “dig each other,” though they’re not engaged or anything, because who wants to get married? (Women do, Carrie replies, and this seems to be news to Ken.) He also tells her, “Be forewarned, naïve little country chick from Oregon. Michael Carlisle is one guy you don’t get serious about. Got that?”

Mike proves to have been accurately drawn, looking Carrie over with appreciation at their introduction, calling her “dear,” and asking her out. He also offers her the job caring for high-flying ad man Jim Orr, who has coronary artery disease, and is about three martinis and a four-hour client meeting from dropping dead of a heart attack. It’s Carrie’s job to make sure that Jim does absolutely nothing interesting, drink absolutely nothing but water, and eat absolutely nothing that tastes good. Reluctantly she signs on—maybe she’ll get to see Ken once in a while!—but it soon proves that she is unable to keep poor Jim from behaving, and frankly she’s starting to see his point that “if I do follow doctor’s orders, I’ll be miserable. In which case I may as well be dead.”

Jim’s wife, Sheila, is an over-the-top glamour puss who flings her minks any old place, quaffs Manhattans like the pro she is, and flits around shouting, “Darling!” She has also risen up through the ranks at the advertising agency and is now doing Jim’s old job, and there’s a bit of discussion about whether that’s proper: “If she was any kind of a woman she wouldn’t be doin’ it herself. One minute fussin’ over him an’ kissin’ him, then the next minute she’s rushin’ off to get herself all gussied up to go to some big, important ‘meeting,’” grumbles the housekeeper, Mrs. Groscuth. “One thing she could do is her own cookin’ and pill-givin’, like any decent woman would.” But Sheila must have some talent for the ad job or she wouldn’t have been promoted, an obvious conclusion we readers quickly reach, and Carrie valiantly points out that it takes a lot of income to support a housekeeper, nurse, penthouse, Ferrari, and yacht, as Sheila is now single-handedly doing. The problem is that Sheila is an unsympathetic, phony character, so it’s not difficult to agree that she should be doing more for her husband—and the fact that Sheila is having an affair with her boss doesn’t win her any points.

Interestingly, the book insists that forcing a capable, intelligent person to sit around the house doing nothing all day is not a good way to “save” their life. “A man’s got pride and wants to do for himself. Makes him feel like a poor cripple,” blunders the well-intentioned Mrs. Groscuth. That same principle, however, does not seem to apply to Sheila, who is belittled because she refuses to quit her job and wait on her husband.

Carrie decides on day two that she wants to quit, but Mike convinces her to stay on a little longer, and takes her out on a few dates and makes her feel wanted and attractive. He’s aware that she’s in love with Ken, and puts little pressure on her outside of roses on a daily basis and one smooch in the car before she sets him straight, after which he is admirably hands-off. Then, while he’s out of town at a “medical conference” that’s to last 17 days, Carrie agrees to let Jim work secretly work on an ad campaign, and it turns out that the only medication he needed was a yellow legal pad and a pencil, because Jim is now a chastened man: He exercises, gives up alcohol, and devours the unsalted food Mrs. Groscuth reluctantly prepares for him.

All the various personal entanglements erupt in one Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? scene in which the characters are gathered in Jim’s living room for a party. Sheila’s affair is trotted out, and her boss slinks out the door and back to his family. Jim learns that the brilliant print advertising campaign he’s concocted is irrelevant because the company has decided to go with TV instead. Mike is revealed to be in Boston settling the alimony on his first wife, and his second wife—to whom he is still married—and ten-year-old child are still hoping he’ll return to them. Sheila fires Carrie for having caught Sheila and her boss going at it in his Lincoln in the garage. And Ken is pulling Carrie out the door when Jim drops of the major coronary he was doomed, from the first day we met him, to suffer in the penultimate chapter.

It mostly plays out as you expect it will, if you don’t have any hopes that Sheila, the most complex character in the book, will be able to keep both her husband and her job. The sudden engagement—and in this case, very hasty wedding—at the end of a VNRN of two characters who have perhaps not even kissed until the last chapter, much less spent months or years building an actual relationship, is a frustrating aspect of the genre, and author Jane Converse has a habit of giving heroines away to men they’ve secretly pined after for years, with the man paying little or no interest until the final three pages. It’s hard to feel happy for Carrie, because her years-long infatuation with a man 2,000 miles away, as Ken was for the two years prior to the story opening, seems pathetic at best and unhinged at worst. That her hopeless devotion is ultimately rewarded is a sick message to give the reader, and my only (admittedly very minor) consolation here is that Carrie never tries to talk herself into a relationship with Mike. It’s not the worst Jane Converse novel I’ve ever read, but if it’s not the basement, it’s not what you’d expect from the penthouse.

The Taming of Nurse Conway

By Nora Sanderson, ©1964

Nurse Nicky Conway already hated Dr. Peter Trenton, whom she considered responsible for her mother’s death—so that when he began to interfere with her plans for marrying Geoff Hutchinson, it was altogether too much to bear!

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:
“From three till six in the morning—that’s the time a night nurse feels like sitting down and writing a last will and testament.” 

“If you keep on flying into rages like this you’ll have a frightfully interesting stroke when you’re older.”

REVIEW:
Nurse Nicola Conway is easily one of the most unpleasant heroines I’ve ever met. I’m not alone in this assessment—pretty much every other character in the book chews her out at one point or another, over her irrational obsessive persecution of Dr. Peter Trenton, who was on call the night her mother, in her 40s, had a stroke and died at home with Nicky in attendance, before Dr. Trenton could arrive. It’s been more than a year since the incident, and still Nicky cannot bring herself to forgive the man and move on, or even keep a less-than-overtly-hostile expression on her face when he’s in the room. Her excuse for her hatred is that Dr. Trenton has always readily agreed that if he’d arrived sooner, Nicky’s mother would have survived—but it’s also clear that there’s some secret that exonerates the good doctor, and that the only person in New Zealand (where the book is set) who isn’t aware of this secret is Nicky herself.

Unfortunately, the pair work in the same hospital and run into each other on a daily basis—and Nicky can’t help “giving Dr. Trenton hell—you know you have, in a cruel, clever way so that he can’t hit back at you,” says her former best friend Jane, who eventually—along with all the other nurses—gives Nicky the cold shoulder for her shoddy treatment of the man, who is much beloved by the rest of the staff, the patients, and every member of the community, who all but stop him in the street and ask for his autograph. The only mystery bigger than the one surrounding Mrs. Conway’s death is why Nicky hasn’t been fired for her constant maliciousness: “If I were Dr. Trenton I’d see that you didn’t last one more day on the nursing staff,” says another ex-friend nurse. “You’re just a spoiled, self-opinionated little brat! We’d all be glad to see you go.”

So Nicky says truly horrendous things to poor Dr. Trenton on pretty much every other page, and by mid-book we readers are also wishing she’d get sacked. Even when—as you know would happen—Nicky decides, “I’ve gone and been mad enough to fall head-over-heels in love with Dr. Trenton,” which seems essentially impossible given her unswerving hatred for the man, her behavior barely budges out of the appalling zone.

A large and fairly stupid subplot involves a childhood friend of Nicky’s, Geoff Hutchinson, who has fruitlessly been hounding Nicky to marry him—and who is a victim of an accident at work that blinds him. As the weeks roll by and Geoff’s vision does not recover, Nicky idiotically decides she will marry Geoff and be his full-time nurse, for reasons that are never entirely clear. Dr. Trenton is convinced that Geoff is faking his blindness, and Nicky is equally sure he is not—giving them fodder for many more exasperating arguments—but interestingly, Geoff himself is barely seen at all in much of the book despite his starring role in the impending ruin of Nicky’s life and in all her arguments with Dr. Trenton. The question of whether Geoff is rendered a helpless baby by his blindness is viciously argued on both sides by Nicky—a hypocrisy that the book itself never acknowledges—depending on who she’s talking to: She insists that Geoff is unable to fend for himself when she’s screaming at Dr. Trenton that she must go through with the marriage, and furious that her fellow nurses are “all so determined to thrust him back into the nursery! Losing their sight doesn’t make a child of anyone!”

Equally perplexing is the huge amount of discussion about Nicky donating one of her corneas to Geoff so he would be able to see, and Dr. Trenton’s refusing to allow it—then agreeing, thinking that Geoff would never agree to Nicky’s losing an eye if he is malingering—but never in all of the talk is the surgery ever discussed with Geoff himself, which would quickly put an end to the debate and at least one source of much arguing. (The whole fake-blindness plot is not a new one, either; we’ve met it in New Surgeon at St. Lucien’s, which was also published under the Harlequin imprint though by a different author, Elizabeth Gilzean.)

Throughout this overly long book, we are subjected to a “self-righteous and critical and downright conceited,” “bad-tempered and resentful” heroine (we are told several times that Nicky is a good nurse, but we never see her do any actual nursing, and even the patients think she’s “as polite as a tiger crouching to spring”). She is frequently and rightfully called a child and told to grow up, regularly makes ridiculous decisions and stubbornly clings to them, and nastily attacks a very kind and patient doctor to the point where I think she could be prosecuted for harassment, if not creating a hostile work environment. Her assault on the doctor—and by extension the patients, nursing staff, and even us readers—drags right through to the final pages, when the foolish mystery about Mrs. Conway’s death is cleared up and we learn that if everyone had just been honest from the outset, we could have been spared 189 pages of maddening irritation. It’s impossible to believe that anyone could love Nurse Conway, and at no point is she “tamed” that I can see—rather, I pity the fool who would spend a single minute more with her than they absolutely have to. Do not, dear readers, I implore you, be such a fool—leave this book on the shelf.

Nurse Deborah

By Marjorie Norrell, ©1969

Nurse Debby Carfax had always viewed her half-cousin Margot with some wariness—Margot having always been the type of girl who couldn’t see Debby have anything without wanting to take it away from her. And now Debby had a promising new boy-friend, and Margot had announced that she was coming to Debby’s hospital to work …

GRADE: C-

BEST QUOTES:
“One doesn’t run the risk of dying of ennui in our profession, does one?”

“Being afraid is the one thing to fear.”

“To get something out of anything—life, love, work, happiness, but most of all life itself—one has to put something in before being able to take something out.”

“Never underestimate yourself, child. That’s a fatal thing to do. Remember, most people accept other people at their own valuation, so don’t set too low a price on your own head.”

REVIEW:
It’s depressing to close a book of 188 pages and realize that in all that time, pretty much nothing happened between the last sentence and the first. At the same time, Nurse Deborah starts out in a rather familiar fashion—lovely Deborah Carfax, of the easy, open, and friendly manner; the great skill for nursing; and the warm and loving family, is saddled with her cousin Margot Ruthermeade, who is the exact opposite: clever and unscrupulous, “selfish in every way,” and manipulative, someone who makes a game of smashing all Debby’s friendships and is unable to form any of her own because she cares only for herself. (Although Margot clearly cares a great deal about destroying Debby’s life, this deep, lifelong hateful commitment is never explained.) This is a plotline that has been plumbed in other VNRNs (There Came a Surgeon, Hospital on Wheels), so it loses points for its unoriginality.

Debby has just been forging a friendship with shy resident Robin Peterson, but from the moment Margot shows up in town and senses the budding romance, it is mere child’s play for her to drive a wedge between the two before they’ve even become established as a real couple. So for most of the book, “Robin’s attitude indeed had changed, from one of something more than friendliness back to its original one of formal politeness.” Debby just sadly accepts the situation, saying, “We haven’t even talked enough to quarrel!” and apparently never will talk enough to set things straight.

Meanwhile, Margot chases wealthy and important doctors, somehow attracting the understanding and affection of Dr. Philip Randall, who frequently consults Debby in his stealthy pursuit of Margot, further clouding the way between Debby and Robin, who misunderstands the friendship. Debby does manage to invite Robin to the Matron’s Ball, but Robin decides to show up only when the formal dinner is about to begin, after the dance is over and Debby has spent most of the evening crying in the hallway, because having barely had any friendly words with him for the first third of the book and virtually none at all for the last two-thirds, “she loved Robin Peterson, truly loved him, with all the fire of her more than generous heart, with every fibre of her small, compact being.”

But just as the supper is starting—and Robin is dashing back out of the ball three minutes after arriving in another maddening mix-up in which he mistakes Margot for Debby kissing Dr. Randall on the dance floor—a flash fire erupts, igniting one of the senior nurses, who is conveniently saved by wallflower Debby, but apparently nothing else is touched, as the fire department is not called and the dinner proceeds with only a short delay. Debby is hauled off in a stretcher, the senior nurse is never mentioned again, and all the dancers make do with a stand-up buffet instead of a sit-down dinner. Robin and Margot both rush to Debby’s hospital bed and confess their love and sins respectively to her gauze-wrapped body. And that’s the end.

You’d think there would be more to report about the story, and more of a relationship outside of what can only be called a budding friendship before undying love and marriage proposals are declaimed—at least on one side, as Debby’s face is bandaged and she’s high on morphine, and so rendered mute. There’s not, though, so I can’t really advise you to spend the hours requisite to plowing through this dull, unsatisfying story.

Crystal Manning, Maternity Nurse

By Nan Lowry (pseud. of Ruth MacLeod), ©1964
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti?

As the young head nurse of the busy maternity ward, Crystal Manning often went beyond the call of duty to bring compassion to her patients. Then one of her kind gestures backfired. She was accused of kidnapping a new-born baby. Nurse Manning needed all the help she could get at this crucial time, particularly from the two men who loved her: Lloyd Norris, a successful attorney; and Mike Dorand, the friendly young doctor with whom she worked. As a nurse, she knew that she would have to clear her name or neither man would want her for his wife.

GRADE: D 

BEST QUOTES:
“There is nothing coy or coquettish about you. Sometimes it’s discouraging.”

“She did not want him to think she was the cheap sort of floozie who casually concluded her dates with a bit of heavy necking.”

“A psycho can behave most intelligently at times.” 

REVIEW:
If you were looking for one-stop shopping for all the grotesque stereotypes of the past, you would have to go a long way to find a single book more stocked with insensitivity than Crystal Manning, Maternity Nurse, in which we meet a family with a developmentally delayed son and visit a Chinese restaurant—I will spare you from how the book portrays these situations—meet a couple who refuse to adopt a baby from an agency because “we don’t want some little tramp’s discarded bastard,” and watch the nurse tell a woman whose newborn has died, “That’s no excuse for being such a cry baby.” Of course, I haven’t even started on the usual misogyny: A husband needs to sign consent for his fully alert and competent wife’s surgery, and a wife’s blaming herself for her husband’s walking out on her and their six children.

We are also subjected to a handful of the usual VNRN tropes. Nurse Crystal is dating Lloyd Norris, an attorney ten years her senior who “had an endearing, proprietary manner with her, calling her ‘doll’ and ‘darling’ in a way that made her feel like a cherished child.” Ew. We are not surprised that she does not love him, though he is wild about her and is pressuring her to marry him. She’s actually hot for Dr. Mike Dorand, in his last year of residency, and knows she will never love Lloyd the way she does Mike. But Mike runs hot and cold, so she naturally concludes that he doesn’t have any interest in her, and tries to convince herself that she should accept Lloyd’s proposal. “He was sweet, he was a fine, wonderful man and he loved her. Few women were so fortunate. So why couldn’t she grab her luck while she had the chance? Some day, when it was too late, she might wish in sorrow and desperation that she had.” Because any marriage would be better than none, apparently. “She wondered which sort of marriage brought a woman the greatest happiness and satisfaction. One in which she fulfilled a man’s deepest needs—as it would be if she married Lloyd? Or one in which she was forever striving to fulfill her own emotional needs through love for a man like Mike?” I’m not sure why the latter is apparently being held up as something wrong.

An interesting point in the plot is that when Lloyd and Crystal are kissing, “as the pulsing warmth of his embrace stirred some inner dormant fire, she was lost in a wild urge to respond. For timeless moments her heartbeats rioted as her lips answered the pressure of his.” Lloyd is thrilled by her physical response, insisting that “it’s there, the love and passion to make our marriage wonderful.” The idea that if she has a sexual urge she must be in love is curious; I doubt anyone would make this mistake about a man.

There’s also the question of whether she should give up her career for marriage. Early on, of course, she loudly protests, “Marriage couldn’t make me not be a nurse.” Adding to his charms, Lloyd tells her, “I wouldn’t demand that you give up nursing altogether, or right away. I’d like to hope that gradually you to become so happy and occupied as my wife that it would fill all your needs.” Instead of running, she proves herself a hypocrite by deciding, “If I really loved Lloyd I could give it all up to share his life completely.” This makes no sense, particularly since she’s already pointed out to Lloyd that he wouldn’t ever not want to be an attorney. And when Lloyd continues to present his feelings to her on the subject, asking her, “Honeychild, when are you going to let me take you out of all this and provide the kind of life a doll like you is made for?” she is not repulsed, either by his demeaning choice of endearments or his obvious intent for her to stop working if she marries him.

Beyond all the alarming biases, there is a plot here: Mrs. Perkins, saddled at home with five kids, has just had a sixth, and Mike diagnoses the newborn with phenylketonuria, which will cause the little girl to have brain damage if she’s given food containing excessive phenylalanine. This diet is going to be very expensive for the dirt-poor Mrs. Perkins, whose husband has left her because she refuses to put five-year-old developmentally delayed Joey in an institution, where, we are repeatedly told, “he’ll have the care he needs, and the other children will have a better chance to develop normally, unhampered by his presence.” Eventually, though, she decides she’d rather have her husband than Joey, so when Mr. Perkins finally shows up, they’re a happy couple once more with still just five kids at home.

Meanwhile, Susan Carter has lost her baby and her uterus, possibly because Dr. Leslie Hampton, who even the orderlies think is “scared to do cesarean sections,” stalled performing that surgery until Mrs. Carter’s uterus ruptured. Crystal, attempting to help the grieving, childless woman realize “your adjustment to it will strengthen your character,” tells her about poor Mrs. Perkins’ plight. Susan immediately decides that she will adopt Baby Girl Perkins, and breaks every rule in the book trying to make this happen—and Crystal breaks quite a few herself in acting as intermediary between the two women, even though she feels (and repeatedly says to Mrs. Perkins) the baby should stay with its biological mother, mostly because Mrs. Perkins might change her mind later on.

When Susan Carter finally kidnaps Baby Perkins, which you saw coming a mile away, Crystal’s gross irresponsibility is rightfully made much of by the hospital superintendent, the police, and Susan’s husband Neil. “I should think that one of the first things you would have learned in your hospital training was not ever, under any circumstances, to gossip with one patient about another’s problems!” shouts the superintendent, and suspends her. She spends the next day at the Perkins farm helping take care of the kids and the chores, and when she gets home, a cop is waiting to take her down to the station—the kidnaped baby has turned up in Crystal’s own bed, and she’s under suspicion for the crime. But never mind about that, the superintendent brings her back on the job the following morning, because things have been crazy in obstetrics on her one day of suspension! And it’s probably that crazy Susan who did it, who’s been found nearly psychotic and is refusing to speak!

Suddenly it’s two weeks later, and Mike tells Crystal he’s decided to go back to school to study public health. Crystal is upset because this means he might decide he’s too poor to marry, and in attempting to convince him otherwise, the dime finally drops for Mike, and twenty seconds later they’re engaged. The chief of obstetrics walks in as they are clinching the deal, and tells them to save it for their time off. Unbelievably, Crystal shouts, “You have no right to sneer at our love! It’s perfectly proper and decent—which is more than you can say about your clandestine affair with Marilee Gifford!” Marilee is Crystal’s own roommate, who has been secretly in love with the married Dr. Hartford for many years, and who has repeatedly assured Crystal—who always nags her hypocritically that she shouldn’t chase after a man who shows no interest in her but should go out with men she’s not interested in—that they are not having an affair at all. I tell you, seldom have I been so shocked by a VNRN as when I read Crystal’s complete betrayal of her best friend.

Dr. Hartford responds by suggesting that he could have Crystal fired, and Mike, apparently having acquired a few unfortunate tendencies from his horrid fiancée, tells Dr. Hartford that if he fires Crystal, he will order an investigation into two cases of Dr. Hartford’s that had bad outcomes. Dr. Hartford remarkably manages not to order them both out of the hospital immediately but instead calmly explains the two cases and why he is not to blame for them, and Mike is forced to agree. The whole nasty situation doesn’t end there, but has dark repercussions in Dr. Hartford’s marriage and his relationship with Marilee—and Crystal again decrees that Marilee’s decisions, startlingly like her own (a fact she completely fails to recognize) are “terribly wrong” and “lacked integrity.” So she decides she’s going to set up her now-dumped ex-boyfriend Lloyd and Marilee, believing Marilee will go out with Lloyd for no other reason other than that she has dared Marilee to do just that. Mike sees Crystal with Lloyd in his car when she’s wheedling him to ask Marilee on a date, and Mike speeds off. Now Crystal is frantic that Mike thinks she’s still seeing Lloyd and that it’s over between them, but Mike at least has learned something from all these explosive situations and tells Crystal the next day that he trusts her to make good decisions of her own. He clearly does not know Crystal very well.

Crystal Manning is one of the more alarming heroines I have met in a VNRN. She never learns to stop her own stupid mouth, and she suffers no consequences for any of her many very bad decisions. Marilee never learns of Crystal’s betrayal, so Crystal gets off scot-free with that backstabbing, and a one-day suspension hardly seems a fitting punishment for all her ethics-stomping involvement with the Perkins baby—not to mention that at the time she was under suspicion for kidnaping. Instead she lands the man she wants, who gives her the benefit of the doubt that she never gives anyone else, a point that is utterly lost on her. Finally, we have the copious bigoted attitudes as the cherry on the top of this poison, if you needed any further inducement to stay far away from Crystal Manning, Maternity Nurse.

Alternative cover, from the
second printing in 1966

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.  

Doctor Ellen

Adèle De Leeuw, ©1944
Cover Illustration by Rudy Nappi 

Lovely Ellen Paige met a host of violent reactions every time she reaffirmed her intention of being a doctor. “It’s—well, it’s so unfeminine,” her sister Joyce said. “It’s hard for a man; it’s even harder for a woman,” kindly Dr. Seth warned. “I want a doctor—one with pants on,” complained and injured patient. “No woman should be a doctor—and you least of all,” handsome Tim Flagg fellow student, commented. The old prejudice against woman physicians was still very much alive, but Ellen waged her battle staunchly, determined to be a doctor as well as a woman—and to be accepted as both.

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:
“What’s the idea? Trying to titillate the optic nerve unduly?”

“It must be fun to be young.”

REVIEW:
Doctor Ellen hits the ground with a nauseating bang when our protagonist “flung back the covers and leaped out of bed” and “sang out”—first thing in the morning, mind you!—“Morning, Mums!” It’s a wonder I managed to press on to the second sentence. The ensuing pages are admittedly less alarming, but they are stuffed with the misogynist stereotypes that Ellen is battling as she begins her third year of medical school: “Do you have to wear those awfully mannish suits all the time?” Mums asks. “It’s—well, it’s so unfeminine,” says sister Joyce, who doesn’t think Ellen will ever get married if she insists on going through with this doctor thing. “Girls don’t make good doctors!” says little brother Bill, and somehow Ellen refrains from smacking his fat head. “No woman should be a doctor,” says medical student Tim Flagg, who thinks Ellen should instead be his wife: “It’s my mission in life to persuade you you’ve made a mistake.”

There’s also the institutionalized sexism, such as the fact that “the men students had automatically been enrolled in the Army, their training supervised, their tuition paid for. But the women students had to struggle along as best they could, with prospects as lean as ever and, of course, no financial aid forthcoming.” The anatomy professor takes “special delight in baiting ‘hen medics,’ in making it hard for them and quizzing them unmercifully. He addressed himself to the men; the women were their only on sufferance, and he ignored them as much as possible.”

We watch with lifted brow while Ellen allows cave man Tim to pick her up at the train station, take her to dinner and deliver her to her rooming house, all the while cheerfully submitting to his sexist inanities. Once we get to the rooming house, however, Ellen starts to redeem herself when she meets a new boarder, Frances Tyndall, with a skeptical glance of her own. “So that’s her line, is it? Little, innocent, and helpless,” Ellen thinks snarkily to herself after the girl bats her eyelashes at the dinner table, and we like her more for it. “Being homesick and terrified and appealing all within three minutes—if this was a sample of the Tyndall mind and conversation, she saw a trying year ahead.”

And, over the ensuing pages, Ellen Paige grows on you. Like the irritating Frances, “She hadn’t been easy to live with at first, but in the painful process of growing up she had endeared herself to them.” Most of the book follows Ellen in the day-to-day of school, an externship, patients, successes and failures. She befriends a nice young wannabe surgeon Andrew McKenzie, who makes a point of stopping her after a class during which she had diagnosed a patient as having a glass eye and been subjected to the ridicule of her classmates—and little appreciation when it had turned out that she was right. “That was a brilliant piece of work,” Andrew tells her, and she answers, “There weren’t any other congratulations, though,” and our hopes begin to lift that maybe Tim won’t star in the final chapter—though he does give us quite a scare at Christmas after he wins over every single person in Ellen’s family, including Joyce’s babies and the hard-boiled cook.

Early on we sense the usual tragedy-in-the-slums trope bearing down on us when Ellen complains, “What’s that matter with cities that they can’t see the sores festering in their midst? The dirt and the slums and the rottenness? It seems like working in a circle. People studying to be doctors, men inventing medicines and cures and machines and gadgets to make life better and never getting at the root of the evil, the conditions that make sick people and criminals and poverty.” After a visit to a paralyzed child who is left alone all day in the dark while her mother works, during which a rat runs over Ellen’s shoe, Ellen gets all hot and bothered, and Andrew introduces her to a reporter, and before long there are speeches and donations and political upheaval, and a lot fewer rats in town. Ellen also works to bring Easter and Christmas celebrations to the Children’s Ward, and purpose to the life of a nurse’s aide whose husband is off fighting in the war—fairly standard stuff, it must be confessed, but presented without too much treacle.

The writing is solid and occasionally humorous, and author Adele De Leeuw, an acclaimed children’s author who wrote more than fifty books, was here in mid-career. This story is not as fluffy as it could have been; there are truly tragic characters, including one very impoverished female medical student who is forced to drop out of school to care for her siblings after her mother is incapacitated by stroke, and the paralyzed girl who inspired the rat extermination crusade. The overwhelming theme of the book seems to be learning to stand on your own, to have confidence in yourself to do the right thing. “You don’t get your strength from playing to the gallery, only from yourself,” Andrew tells her, and as the last two years of medical school pass, we watch Ellen’s confidence grow out of almost-failures, out of tragedy, out of success that isn’t just luck but earned through hard work. I would love to know what prompted De Leeuw to turn out this book, which thought it must have required a great deal of research appears to have been her only attempt at medical fiction (though she wrote three nonfiction books about nurses). But if you are going to write only one VNRN, it should be, as this is, one to be proud of.