Judy George, Student Nurse

By Patti Stone, ©1966
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

 

For Judy George, nursing is full of challenge and drama. When an accident case is brought into emergency, Judy is strangely attracted to the gaunt, red-haired victim known only as Joe Smith. Though his recovery is quick despite a persistent loss of feeling in one thumb, Joe is depressed. To help him overcome his handicap, Judy convinces him that the best therapy is to work at the hospital. He surprises everyone with his care and concern for crippled children. Judy wonders just what he did before the accident, but Joe mysteriously guards his past. Soon Judy realizes that, despite the fact he is still a stranger to her, she is in love with him. But how can she plan the future with a man who refuses to discuss his past?

 

GRADE: C

 

BEST QUOTES:

“I bet you’re a first-year intern. They’re the only ones I know who go around bragging they’re doctors.”

 

“Our theme song is the ambulance siren.”

 

“It’s surprising how much courage a touch of lipstick can give a woman.”

 

“His chart shows he’s been having the delirium tremens for 24 hours.”

“Yes,” Joe said soberly.

 

“It wasn’t easy to stop nursing, Judy. But my husband—and now my son—work long hours under tension. They want to put their problems aside in their home. I suppose most nurses daydream of marrying a doctor and working by his side. Well, that wasn’t the kind of wife my husband wanted. But, by creating a calm, pleasant atmosphere, I feel I am helping him in my own way.”

 

“You’ve studied so much in the past few weeks that pretty soon you’ll be up in surgery as a patient being operated on for strabismus—which, in case you’ve forgotten, is crossed eyes.”

 

REVIEW:

Judy George is yet another nurse-orphan, raised by yet another country GP grandfather, Grandpa Noah, along with her sister and three younger brothers. Anne is now working as a nurse back in Wheatville, married and expecting a baby of her own, while still raising their brothers. Judy is finishing her final year of training at Bonifacio General in Kansas City, and as the book opens she is trapped in the service elevator with Dr. Harry Jennison, an up-and-coming OB/GYN whose father is chief of staff at the hospital. They immediately start dating, but Harry seems more into it than Judy. She’s bound to go back to Wheatville after she graduates, and Harry, she knows, is just not meant for a small-town practice. “Harry considered Wheatville just a wide place in the road,” so that cools Judy’s ardor somewhat. “She was committed to going home as soon as she finished training. She didn’t dare fall in love.” Famous last words.

 

Then this man is brought into the ED when Judy is working there. His arm has been damaged in a car accident, and he has no identification on him. When he wakes up, he gives his name as Joe Smith—gee, I wonder if that’s an alias?—and is a charity patient on the ward, though his clothes and car were expensive, and he is clearly well-educated. He tells everyone that he has no friends or family, and he is grumpy as all get out because his right hand is partially paralyzed from the accident. Judy, who is now working on the men’s medical ward, takes him on as a personal project. Why is he so bad-tempered? Then a briefcase is brought in, and Judy takes a peek and finds out it contains sketches, and so concludes “Joe Smith” was an artist. She decides that what Joe really needs is a job, so she orchestrates a position as an orderly for him when he recovers. When she sees him pushing a small boy in a wheelchair, “elation swept through her. She had no idea why, but she had never in her entire life felt so happy.” Well, I don’t know about you, readers, but I can take a guess why. Can you?

 

He’s still irritable as ever—when Judy exclaims that she’s surprised to see him working, he answers, “I have a funny habit. I like to eat,”—but Judy persists in her friendly way and over time he warms up. Eventually he even asks her out. But he’s still a very angry young man, shouting at Judy and breaking her pencil when she’s all excited that he was able, with his left arm, to draw the bones of the arm when he’s helping her study for her exams. “They teach anatomy in art schools, too, you know,” he growls at her. She grovels for his forgiveness, and he’s kind enough to give it. He’s a swell guy, is Joe Smith.

 

Then he becomes obsessed with a young boy whose hand was scarred by burns and is now a useless claw. The boy has become virtually catatonic, and Joe is convinced that if the hand is repaired, the boy will get better. He persuades Judy to persuade Harry to persuade his father to persuade his friend Dr. Carter, who specializes in children’s plastic surgery, to take the case. Joe watches the surgery, which is a huge success, of course, but afterward he’s pale and sweating, and he refuses to talk to Judy, “shoved her violently aside,” and runs from the OR. “Before her eyes she had seen a man go to pieces, and she didn’t know why.” Two pages later, Joe has resigned his position and gone AWOL.

 

Not to worry, there’s nothing like a natural disaster to bring two star-crossed lovers together. Judy is working in the decrepit geriatric wing when the tornado hits and destroys the building. She, in typical VNRN fashion, is the last one out, having gone in to check for any more patients, and Joe shows up the day she is discharged. He drives her home—but guess what, her sister is in labor and not doing well, and the Green River is over the road in a couple of places and one of the bridges isn’t in very good condition, and the phone lines are down so they can’t call a doctor. “She needs a doctor now,” Judy declares, when she and Joe finally arrive and find Anne struggling. Now, prepare yourself for this shocker! “There’s me,” Joe says quietly, and he’s not joking! He’s a plastic surgeon from the very top residency program in the nation, with nine years’ experience! I was pleased that in the end, he doesn’t remember anything about the dosages of medications for birthin’ babies, which would have been a stretch for a plastic surgeon. Mostly he just assists Anne with the labor and then delivers the baby with forceps, with nothing but a tiny bruise on her head to show for it. And he’s so excited by his success that he wants to become a GP in Wheatville! Really? Wheatville? asks Judy the dunce. “This is the only town you’d consider living in,” he answers, and follows that up with his marriage proposal. She accepts, and then he tells her that his name isn’t Joe Smith at all! It’s Jason Sibley!!! Who knew?

 

This book seemed a bit familiar, as the GP grandfather and the disaster at the end of the book are straight out of Patti Stone’s Big Town Nurse, as is the fact that Patti introduces us to about every single person in the hospital—in this book, we meet 57 medical professionals as well as half again as many patients. And it does bother me when the heroine nurse can’t see what’s been clearly obvious to the reader since, oh, page 18. At 160 pages, this book is too long to contain what little it does, and if it’s not overtly irritating, it doesn’t have a whole lot to recommend it, either, apart from the excellent Lou Marchetti cover.

Dude Ranch Nurse

By Diana Douglas
(pseud. Richard Wilkes-Hunter), ©1970

The bus toiled up the treacherous mountain road, carrying red-haired Nicole Lawson to her new job as nurse at the High Sierra Dude Ranch. High Sierra, where March men, her employers, wrangled bitterly among themselves. High Sierra, rimmed by craggy mountains where dangers lurked. High Sierra, where she soon would be the object of violent emotions: jealousy, anger, desire—and love…

 

GRADE: B-

 

BEST QUOTES:

“You’re even more attractive when you’re mad!”

 

“You’re pretty as a palomino.”

 

“Don’t tell me a girl who looks like you wants to work all the time?”

“She’s too young and far too pretty to be a good nurse.”

 

REVIEW:

There are actually three books called Dude Ranch Nurse, if you can believe it, and the second one I’ve read. (See the first one here; the third is from the Cherry Ames series, which are mystery stories for girls of the Nancy Drew ilk, and so will not be reviewed for this blog.) Of the two VNRNs, this one is better, which is a bit surprising, as this author has earned nothing higher than a C+ from me in the past, while Arlene Hale has garnered three B+ marks. But I think this counts as faint praise.

 

Our heroine, Nicole Lawson, has taken a job for the summer at the High Sierra dude ranch in the Bighorn Mountains in Wyoming. The ranch is run by the March family, and patriarch Howard is confined to a wheelchair by multiple sclerosis. He’s a capable and cantankerous old crab who refuses any kind of help, but Nicole immediately finds him endearing. His son Dane, however, does not. Dane is a boor, the kind of swaggering lout who shows up an hour late to collect Nicole at the bus station. When he does arrive, he offers no apology but instead “his eyes lingered on the full breasts, the slim legs.” These references to the heroine’s anatomy to me clearly bespeak a male writer; women writers will proclaim a heroine’s beauty but pay little attention to their bodies.

 

There’s another March boy, Dr. Michael, who has set up the ranch’s first-aid station. He lives in Minneapolis—the same city she’s from, thought the two have never met before—and he drops by the ranch, intending to stay only a few days to help her set up shop. The two have a drink together, and he sees her to her door and doesn’t kiss her goodnight, to her chagrin. “If he had wanted to kiss me I would’ve let him! she admitted to herself. I would have been as submissive and thrilled as any fool teenager.” I’ve never heard of teenagers being described as submissive before, but Nicole needn’t worry; soon they’re kissing and making plans to meet in Minneapolis.

 

Meanwhile, there’s an odd dynamic between Nicole and the other male ranch hands. Some of them drop by the clinic and make almost violent passes at her; early on one gets a little too close for comfort and refuses to move away until she opens the autoclave and releases some steam in his direction to frighten him off. Dane is the most aggressive, but Nicole does not seem intimidated by him or the others, out of unrevealed martial arts skills or stupidity: “If anyone like Dane March tried to force her into something she didn’t want to do she would know how to handle him!” Or she’s just kidding herself: Her first night at the High Sierra, a drunken Dane tries to break into her cabin, and she most definitely does not know how to handle it. “Her mind raced with terror,” and she jumps out of bed and presses her back “stupidly” against the locked door while staring fearfully at the windows, wondering if they’re locked, too. She’s saved when Michael turns up and drags Dane away. “But soon Michael would be gone and she would be alone here. She was frightened but she tried to fight her feelings. She was not a schoolgirl to be frightened by sounds in the night, or by a drunk’s attempts to force a drink upon her. If a situation like that arose again she would know how to handle it. She would be firmer next time, if there was a next time. Not scared, as she had been tonight. She would put Dane March, or anyone else who got out of line, right back where they belonged!” Uh, right.

 

When he comes around the clinic the next day, Dane threatens her, “Don’t try to brush me off, Nicole. I wouldn’t like that.” She puts him right back where he belongs with her usual mantra: “Nobody is going to make me do anything that I don’t want to do. And I mean nobody.” He is so defeated by this that he grabs her, “his strong arms crushed her against him, hurting her breasts. She gasped in pain, and tried to push away from him.” As he is “bending his dark face to hers,” another ranch hand, who has been clawed by a grizzly in the mountains, is carried in the door, and her attacker is foiled.

 

But the entire situation is swept under the bearskin rug when, after the first day of a camping trip on horseback with the ranch guests, one of the hands gallops into camp. Old Howard March has had a very bad attack of MS, and Nicole is needed to care for him. En route back to the High Sierra, the bloodthirsty grizzly attacks the ranch hand and kills Nicole’s horse. She escapes into the mountains, but this bear is either really hungry or really pissed, because soon it’s coming after her. She crawls into a cave, and though the bear is unable to reach her through the tiny entrance she wriggled through, it discovers a hole at the top of her hiding place and digs its way in. As it plops into the cave, though, she squirms out the entrance again—and now the bear is trapped inside the cave, unable to get out the way it came in. When she’s done vomiting, Nicole looks up and sees Michael with her chaperone ranch hand, who hadn’t been killed by the bear after all, climbing up to her. She promptly faints, waking back at the High Sierra to hear Howard—now totally cured, apparently—asking Michael if he’s planning to marry Nicole. He is, of course; he’s going to take her back to Minneapolis that very day and marry her, and “we’re not coming back.” Sure, she says, though as she’s kissing him she’s thinking about all the vacations they would spend at High Sierra.

 

The abrupt ending leaves quite a few questions about the March family unanswered. Dane is unreprimanded for his predatory behavior, and lives on to assault future ranch nurses. The brothers are as embattled as ever, perhaps now more so, since that Michael is marrying the object of Dane’s aggressions. Nicole’s unrealistic attitude of invincibility remains intact; though she was able to ward off one ranch hand and the grizzly, she was clearly unable to protect herself against Dane and has learned nothing from the experience. But the story itself isn’t half bad, even if—as usual with Richard Wilkes-Hunter’s novels—there isn’t much to it. If you are intent on visiting a literary dude ranch, if only so you can say with a laugh that you have, this is the one to pick, but don’t expect much from the trip.

City Doctor

By Thomas Stone
(pseud. Florence Stonebraker), ©1951

 

Sometimes working with Philip was more than Jane could bear. She admired him as a doctor; she loved him as a man. But Philip preferred women like Cynthia—Sin for short. So Jane worked with him day after day, while his nights belonged to Cynthia, until that night when Jane found herself in desperate trouble, trouble that would smear her over the front page and wreck her career. No one could help but Philip, and to help her she must make him see her as a woman. … Here is a dramatic, behind-the-scenes story of the medical profession—the private lives of some of those men and women in white.

 

GRADE: A

 

BEST QUOTES:

“His patients practically never had the bad manners to die on him.”

 

“I play no favorites,” Phil sometimes said, when a woman asked him if he preferred blondes, or what. “All I demand of my gals is that they know how to hold their liquor, mean that come-hither look in their eye, and that I’m the one man in their life, as long as I’m holding them in my arms.”

 

“San Francisco is my first and truest love. But the old city is really quite a trollop, you know. She was conceived in abandoned sin. The miners came in Forty-Nine, the gals in Fifty-One. And when you think of the lovers she’s had since—show me a two-fisted, hard-drinking man who hasn’t loved San Francisco—she’s really quite the scarlet hussy. And still going strong, after nearly a hundred years.”

 

“Mrs. Lambert does so enjoy being ‘examined’ by you.”

“Too many casual dates leading up to a casual week-end was the most effective way to turn an efficient nurse into a darned nuisance.”

 

“I think women who go in for being reforming influences in other people’s lives should be drowned at birth, don’t you?”

 

“Every attractive woman should take time out for love now and again. It keeps you young, helps the circulation, and it’s very broadening. Don’t you want to be broadened?”

 

“Her hold on him was like the hold liquor gets on a man. The more you had, the more you wanted.”

 

“You’d be surprised how fast a lady can turn into a tramp.”

 

“Haven’t I told you your little iceberg of a nurse could be had, if you put your mind to it?”

 

“I’m not sure you’ll rate so high as a lover, without a few shots of liquor to start you off. Look at you tonight—about as passionate as an ossified oyster.”

 

“The women men respect are usually dull, stolid creatures with low blood pressure.”

 

“That breath of yours is strong enough to wipe out a Nazi division.”

 

“You make a lover sound like these one-a-day vitamin tablets they advertise on the radio. Are you feeling low, depressed, suffering from an energy deficiency; is it hard for you to get started in the morning; are you exhausted when night comes? Then take a lover a day, and you’ll be astonished at the quick pick-ups. Lovers are priced very reasonably and you can find one at your nearest corner drug store.”

 

“Youth tears itself apart over things that were very unimportant. But only age teaches you this. Nothing else can teach it to you.”

 

“Women are all alike, under the skin—all wenches. A man hasn’t got a chance.”

 

“This is a swell drink, baby. There are a lot of things you don’t understand. But how to make drinks isn’t one of them.”

 

“The minute a dame gets a hold on a guy, she figures she’s got to start doing things about his life.”

 

“Oh, it’s love all right, because I’ve lost my appetite. No other man ever did that to me before.”

 

REVIEW:

It is with great joy that I offer you the best nurse novel I have read all year, and once again loudly proclaim Florence Stonebraker’s genius. Not only is this a picture of a relationship that feels profoundly true at its heart even as it dolls itself up in a campy sequined dress and feather boa, but this hard-boiled yet gentle story is as much a romance with the city of San Francisco. So if you think that fabled metropolis is the greatest on earth, as I do, you will be greatly pleased by all the references to local landmarks as well as passages such as: “Phil got up and walked to the window. He lit a cigarette and stood there staring down into the steady drizzle which sprayed the city below, wrapping it in mist. It looked beautiful. Rains, sun, or fog—San Francisco was eternally beautiful. It was forever a dream city.”

 

Jane Walters is a 24-year-old nurse who has worked for two years in the office of Dr. Philip Hastings, located on Sutter Street. (In real life, Florence’s husband William also had an office on Sutter Street, in 1933, just before he left his second wife and ran off to marry Florence. But that’s another story.) Philip has a high-profile and profitable practice of “wealthy idle women whose ailments, in a sense, were one of their sources of amusement.” They summon the good doctor to administer a nightcap when they can’t sleep, wink, wink. Philip is, in other words, a slut.

 

His problem, as the book opens, is that “he was sick of it, to his soul. He was sick of money that he hadn’t really earned. He was sick of the kind of life he’d been living; being a fashionable, high-priced doctor by day, a playboy by night.” Worst of all, he’s been rejected by the Army because he has gastric ulcers, brought on by too much drinking. “It wouldn’t, of course, be some sturdy, he-man disease that could kill a fellow off, something he needn’t be ashamed of, but ulcers,” he says of his diagnosis. This rejection has made him dwell on past failures, such as how he was drummed out of a career in—what else?—surgery, due to a little confusion about his relationship with his mentor’s wife, a situation in which he was, for once, actually innocent.

 

So, maudlin and full of self-pity, he ventures back to the office after a five-day bender that included extended visits to Dizzy Dick’s and several fistfights resulting in a black eye, and tells Jane to tell Mrs. Lambert with the liver condition, who thinks she’s “turning yellow all over,” to “change her brand of whiskey.” Jane, though she recognizes that her boss is not quite right, adds to his misery by telling him that she’s leaving his employ, because “there’s work to be done in the world these days. Real work. I can’t go on any longer playing at work.” Jane’s not cruel, she’s just sees what he really needs: “Pity would be the worst thing in the world for him. What he needed most was to be prodded into standing up to reality and doing a little grappling with it.” So she gives him a few straight facts about himself, and instead of firing her, he asks her to lunch, the first time he has shown any personal interest in her. “You’re the first woman who ever talked to me like that,” he tells her. “You’ve been like a tonic to me.”

 

They go to lunch in Chinatown, he begs her to stay, she accepts. We spend a long afternoon eavesdropping on their conversation, and Phil tries to tell Jane, in a clumsy, honest way, that he’s fallen in love with her. But their new-found romance isn’t going to be so easy. Phil’s most frequent “lovely” is Cynthia Bolton—Sin for short—“a black-chiffon-negligee type of gal,” married to a famous war pilot who was blinded in battle and is now recovering in Palm Springs. She has taken Phil “as a lover,” which is unusual in that these novels very rarely ever give anyone a sex life. And in this case, Cynthia “had more stark physical attraction for him than any woman he’d ever kissed.” But now that he’s found Jane, “there was something flat to it. Somehow, it wasn’t as wonderful as it used to be.” He tries to break it off with Cynthia, but she refuses to go quietly, and tells him that she will tell her husband that she wants a divorce to marry Phil, which will splash his name all over the papers—especially after that incident a few years back with the surgeon’s wife, who named Phil in her suicide note before she jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge—and he will never work again. Never! So Phil’s stuck with Cynthia for now, but still seeing Jane—they spend the night together in a rented bungalow in Carmel, a first for any VNRN heroine I’ve met.

 

They have an interesting argument about Phil’s growing jealousy of Jane’s work, which takes her into an aging neighbor’s house in the evenings. Phil hints that Jane is a “tramp,” which the book repeatedly holds up as the worst thing a gal can be, but then he apologizes: “I hate having to share you with other people,” he says. “I hate having to share you with your work. I want you—I want all of you. Men are like that.” Jane responds, “Either your love for me means something, and it includes understanding and friendship and a willingness to share me with the things that are important to my life, including my work—or it doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s just another phoney.” Phil is angered by Jane’s response: “If just this once she’d come to him in the meek humility and surrender of love,” he thinks. But she does not! Instead, she quits! Then there’s another little misunderstanding, when Phil finds Jane in the arms of the surgeon who she believes been squelching Phil’s application for a job in surgery at the hospital, which seems like it might be the end of Phil and Jane, but it is Cynthia, oddly, who lets slip a bit of information that puts everything to rights between them. Phil passes his Army physical, and Phil urges Jane to enlist as well, saying, “Between us, the wounded soldiers will be pretty lucky guys. I’ll fix up their busted legs, and you can touch their fevered brows.” Even the ending of this book is cute.

 

I am immensely pleased with this book. It has it all: humor, camp, good writing, and a heartfelt story. I urge everyone out there to dig up a copy, fix yourself a frosty cocktail, and settle down with this siren in your lap for a glorious evening.

Shop this title, now republished
under the title Fog City Nurse, here!

His Wife the Doctor

By Joseph McCord, ©1949
Cover illustration by D. Rickard

Serenity Dale, M.D., was firmly established in the city as a Doctor, with an enviable reputation for her skill and hard work. Married to Maury Parrish, a thus far unsuccessful novelist, Serenity was trying hard to prove her theory that marriage and medicine could be happily and profitably combined. All might have gone well had she not accepted, against her own wishes, a position as head of a private hospital, for it was then that her difficulties really began. Before she realized what was happening, Maury was seeking inspiration elsewhere, and she became involved in professional troubles of her own. Fortunately Serenity was a skillful enough doctor and a good enough wife to make her own prescription work, after she was shocked into a realization of the problem with which she was confronted.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“The older I grow the less certain I am just what makes for a successful life.”

 

“The woman in her transcended the physician momentarily, as Serenity thought to herself, ‘She does something to that hair.’ ”

REVIEW:

Dr. Serenity Dale is saddled not just with an unfortunate first name but also a lollygagging, worthless cad of a husband in Maury Parrish. He wants to be a writer, if he could only ever sit down and put pen to paper, but he’s too busy lounging around the house and drinking cocktails. Oh, and worrying that his wife is more successful than he is. “I’m proud of you of course, but I don’t care to be known as Mr. Serenity Parrish,” he tells her in the book’s opening scene, when he has dropped by her office. “I prefer to make good on my own. You don’t suppose I enjoy sponging typewriter ribbons from my wife, do you?” It looks to me like he has little compunction on that score, but that’s just me.

 

Serenity and Maury are living in the city with Serenity’s uncle, bachelor Dr. John McDonald, who is quite wealthy and keeps a valet as well as a driver for his cars. Serenity has also moved into Dr. McDonald’s practice as his right hand, but soon Serenity is appointed superintendent of the Frances Starr Hospital. Maury, for his part, has published a tepid romance and is now allegedly working on another. He never discusses his writing with Serenity or lets her read his works in progress, nor does he ever ask her about her work. Serenity wonders if Maury is really writing at all, as “when Serenity came home at the end of her day his typewriter frequently was covered and there was no sign of the scattered sheets and crumpled wads of paper that invariably marked his labors and which he never bothered to pick up,” the selfish boor. “Indifference,” she calls it, ascribing to the fact that he was “always accustomed to living on his father’s bounty.” Now he’s living on her bounty: She has no idea how much he’s earning in royalties on his one slim volume, and so tucks a roll of bills into the sugar bowl every week as a roundabout way of keeping him in pocket change.

 

One day, Serenity comes home to find a “surprise”—Maury is actually writing! To her “added amazement,” he even attempts to throw his unwanted pages in the trash can!! What’s come over the man? Why, Del Patterson, a childhood girlfriend and successful writer—more successful than Maury, not that it would take much—who has recently moved back to town, “And did she bowl me over!” the tactless man tells his wife. “She’s different. Modern as television. Tall and blond! This afternoon she had on a clinging black dress and I mean it had something to cling to. She touched it all off with a long amber cigarette holder, moved about sort of—slinky.” Even worse, he’s talked over his writing with her, and “she could give me some good ideas.” Soon he is dropping in on Del regularly, and becoming “detached and almost moody” at home. Serenity is busier now at the hospital, but he doesn’t seem to miss her. “Some intangible barrier seemed to be rising between them. […] She had to ignore it. If she ever were to lose her sense of dignity, all would be lost.” Because it’s worse to lose your dignity than your husband, apparently. Though in this case that would be true.

 

He gets a new car, and the first place he gets to is Del’s apartment, where he kisses her. Then Maury’s father, a small-town doctor, dies, and he goes home to deal with it—taking Del, and leaving Serenity at home. When Serenity follows along a few days later to attend the funeral, all Maury can talk of is the fact that he’s not getting a lot of money from the estate. “Maury didn’t realize where much of his father’s substance must have gone. College and two years abroad. Those things took money and doctor’s fees were none too easy to collect,” Serenity thinks, sharing none of this. She’s horrified by his “repugnant” attitude, particularly since he demonstrates no grief at all at his father’s death, but she attempts to paper it over with the idea that “since their marriage he had been almost entirely dependent upon her earnings. Had it harassed and mortified him even more than she had suspected?” I’m not sure that’s a valid excuse, but it’s what Serenity tells herself to stay invested in her marriage.

 

Back at work, the hospital’s benefactress checks into her own hospital with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or Lou Gehrig’s disease, a fatal illness of creeping paralysis that eventually stills the muscles needed to eat and breathe. Ms. Starr’s doctor has prescribed a treatment requiring her to move and speak not at all—which is particularly cruel, if you understand that these abilities will soon be stripped from her—but Serenity feels that a new medication could be beneficial. Ms. Starr consults Serenity audibly, defying her doctor’s orders, and when Dr. Latting gets wind of this, he sees it as an unpardonable sin and conspires to have Serenity fired from her job. She comes home completely distraught, but Maury is “gloomy and preoccupied,” and “in no mood to dispense comfort.” He’s upset, he tells Del after he has sneaked out of the house that evening, because he had planned to go away for a bit to “look for atmosphere, see some new plays, meet some interesting people; sort of let me dust myself off, so to speak.” But now “I’ll have to stick around until I find out what [Serenity losing her job] is going to mean. It sure has got me down.” Interestingly, Del seems disgusted by his behavior; “she did not stir from her corner of the couch as she expressed her sympathy,” and when he leaves, “she offered him her cheek instead of her lips and then stepped away.”

 

The next morning, Del calls Serenity to her house to tell her that she’s leaving town. “You’re the best thing that ever happened to Maury,” she tells Serenity. “Don’t, for Heaven’s sake, think I’m trying to pull something noble. I’m not in the least built that way.” She tells Serenity of her conversation with Maury and that she’s running away, for reasons she won’t disclose—but it seems to me that she’s as disgusted with him, as any sensible person should be, and she has the luxury of not being chained to the damned fool the way Serenity is. “He’s been hoping for a break but not willing to buckle down and work for one,” Del concludes. “I wish for his sake that somebody would talk him out of his writing. He’s not the type to serve an apprenticeship and he can’t afford to be a genius.” She does break into tears and whimper Maury’s name after Serenity has left, but I prefer to think that she’s more broken-hearted that Maury has turned out to be such an ass and is weeping for the man he might have been.

 

The ending is a bit peculiar—though we can bank on Serenity getting her job back, and Serenity and Maury reconciling (they are married, after all, and we can’t have divorce). Maury burns his manuscript and takes a job as an editor, and when he tells Serenity of this, “something like a sob welled in Serenity’s throat but she choked it back resolutely. Maury hadn’t grown up. He hadn’t!” So when they embrace half a page later and all is set to rights between them, I’m just left scratching my head. The man may have a legitimate career ahead of him as an editor, but his whole affair with Del is swept under the rug in a most unhealthy manner, and Serenity herself doesn’t seem too hopeful for his reformation (or is his lack of maturity to be read as a good thing?). I cannot help but feel that Serenity would be far better off without this barnacle, and that he is only going to bring her greater misery in the future. She’s won the battle but lost the war.

 

We the readers, however, are unequivocal winners with this book. The writing is quite good and entertaining throughout, such as when Del drops by the hospital to see Serenity and tells her, “You’ve got a friend of mine in here. You’ve been taking her apart for some perfectly good reason no doubt.” (It was an appendectomy.) For another example, Dr. McDonald tells Maury of a dinner guest: “Jim and I have fished together for years. In fact, he’s recently returned from a trip so you may expect to have your credulity strained.” If the ending is a bit ambiguous, I don’t really mind that; this book, at least, leaves me with something to think about. The story moves gently along as novels from this era frequently do, and you can close this book gently when it’s over, feeling that time spent with it was not wasted.

Big Town Nurse

By Patti Stone, ©1965
Cover illustration by Mort Engel

Beth Patton, R.N. left her small-town home for an exciting year in a city medical center—a year which was to shape the course of her entire career. The patients, the surgery, the tense excitement of “big time” medicine, thrilled the young nurse. But before long, Beth was in trouble. First, she disobeyed orders and was lucky not to be fired. Second, two handsome young doctors were romantically interested in her—and Beth knew that a wrong choice would be a disaster to her as a woman and a nurse.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Her curves do something even for the most shapeless of white uniforms—not that her uniforms are every shapeless.”

“I always did like Georgia peaches—especially blond, cuddly ones.”

“I’ll wait while you put your face on or whatever girls do to look glamorous and efficient at the same time.”

“Keep up the good work, Florence Nightingale. You look real cute and earnest winding a gauze bandage.”

“What a bonbon of a girl you are.”

“Why, what a pretty little thing you are. I would never have guessed you were a nurse.”

“We don’t want a long engagement, but we’ve got to have some time to get to really know each other.”

REVIEW:
Beth Patton has been booted from her small-town home in Hooperville, Texas, by her grandfather, and sent to work at the Mallory Medical Center in Houston. (But Houston is not exactly a big town, as billed in the book’s title. Just pointing that out.) They are both of a type: She is yet another orphan nurse, and Grampy is the classic country general practitioner. She won’t be alone there, though, because there’s another stereotypical VNRN character to keep her company: The slightly older boy-next-door, Pete Verbeck, has become a doctor and is interning there, and his twin sister Paula is a lab tech. The pair welcome Beth with open arms: Paula asks Beth to move into her apartment with her and her roommate, nurse Donna Brook, and Pete swoons: “You know, you’re the only girl in the world whose freckles look like gold dust.”

Beth is just irritated by his poetic flattery, partly because she feels he is too frivolous as a doctor. When a bus crashes and the victims are brought in to the ED where Beth is working, Pete breezes in and flirts with one patient: “Have no fear. Dr. Pete’s here.” Beth is infuriated, but “to her surprise the girl looked as if she would have even giggled if she could”—if she hadn’t broken her jaw, poor thing. Pete works tirelessly as a doctor, “but he handled everything so lightly—as if it were a game. ‘Is that all being a doctor means to him,’ Beth wondered. ‘A game—like swimming or golf—something he simply enjoys because he can do it well?’ ”

Instead she is attracted to Dr. Wayne Bega, the grumpy surgical resident. She can’t help but be impressed by him when she hears him animatedly discussing an appendectomy in the cafeteria. “Ruefully she contrasted his dedication with Pete’s breezy manner. ‘Dr. Bega is just what a doctor should be,’ she thought.” But Pete calls her on this: “You’ve been so darned sheltered. It’s made you just a trifle trite, my honey. You put everybody in little boxes. ‘To be dedicated a doctor has to be serious.’ It’s a black and white rule-book world you live in Beth—but it’s no more realistic than a Victorian novel.” But she is unswerving in her devotion to Dr. Bega, and invites him to come home with her for Christmas when he has nowhere else to go.

Raised in a grim, poverty-stricken mining town, Wayne has scrabbled his way into his career, because as God is his witness, he’ll never be hungry again. “To me there’s nothing good about poverty. It’s only degrading,” he tells her, adding that he hardly ever speaks to his brothers, both poor, because they seem contented with their lot. This rubs Beth the wrong way, because she’s lived and worked among poor farmers and fisherman, and knows the dignity of poverty. Pete’s family, on the other hand, is extremely wealthy, and his father runs the Seaview Sanatorium for the well-to-do back in Hooperville, where wealthy women go to recover from their nervous breakdowns and wealthy men from their alcoholic binges. Pete’s got a job alongside his father waiting for him when he finishes his residency in a few months, and this, too, rankles Beth, that he would take such a degrading job.

But Christmas vacation holds a few surprises. Grampy, for starters, thinks Wayne is an egotistical upstart, and Wayne thinks Grampy—Grampy!—is hopelessly old-fashioned. Then Wayne injures his back waterskiing and is ensconced at the Verbeck sanatorium. The ubiquitous epidemic strikes, and Beth and Pete are back in the harness, working themselves to the bone at Grampy’s little clinic. Grampy takes up Pete as his right hand, and Beth begins to afford Pete some very grudging respect. When Pete suddenly becomes mopey and glum after they return to Houston, Beth is suddenly playing the hypocrite: “How many times had she wanted him to be serious and dignified—now that he was—she missed the old Pete more than she had thought possible.” The solemn Pete unburdens himself one evening to Beth: He’s turning down the job at his father’s clinic and is going to work alongside Grampy as a GP. Oh, and will Beth marry him? He’s “one of the best friends she had,” but she can’t imagine marrying him, even if any VNRN reader past puberty can see where this book is headed. And when Wayne proposes four pages later, after a rant about how foolish Pete is to turn down the Seaview job, Beth can’t help but accept. She’s “too dazed to question” when Wayne tells her that “my wife won’t work” and that he can’t wait to buy her a ring because “I want everybody in the world to see that Beth Patton belongs to me.” She has evolved, but only somewhat: “A strange shadow crossed Beth’s mind. No one should belong to anybody else, like a piece of property. But of course, a man in love says things like that. ‘Your wish is my command,’ she whispered.” Well, for now, anyway.

The signs that this match is doomed come fast and furious. A few days later, Wayne tells Beth that he has resigned his residency and taken the Seaview job that Pete turned down, giving up his dream of being a surgeon. Beth is horrified. “You’ll be a—handyman for neurotics and alcoholics and rich women. All your talent will be wasted,” she tells him, but he just talks about all the great stuff he’ll be able to buy with his enormous paycheck. Then when Beth tells Grampy that she’s going to marry Wayne, Grampy freaks out: “You’re a girl raised in the tradition of service. As his wife, your skill and your mind will wilt. I’ll never approve of this marriage—never.” Beth still refuses to see the light, and over the ensuing weeks attempts to persuade Wayne to go back to surgery, but these conversations always end up in “slashing quarrels.” Weeping on the couch one evening, Beth is found by Pete, who gently asks her, “Are you really in love with Wayne—or are you in love with the dream of a dedicated surgeon?” Beth vows she will never confide in Pete again—“That was certain!”

Then Beth and Pete, working the ambulance shift together one day, go to a Mexican tenement to deliver a baby when a gas oven explodes and Beth is trapped by the fire. Rescued by Pete, and wrapped in bandages back at Mallory, Beth realizes who she really loves. When Wayne comes to see her, he tells her that he’s asked for his surgical residency back and will be returning to Mallory in a few weeks. Too late, Wayne is crushed when Beth tells him she’s leaving him for Pete, but Beth consoles herself that “he had found himself able to face things honestly at last. His return to Mallory proved that. And she was sure when the first blow to his ego eased, he would find challenge and comfort in surgery that would make him forget her, even quicker than he thought he would.” She’s probably right, but it still sounds a bit pat.

Overall, this is a very good book. There are enough campy lines from Pete and Donna to liven it up, and the characters are not as facile as I usually encounter in a VNRN. It may well take the prize for packing in the most stereotypical characters and situations of any nurse novel I’ve read, but that doesn’t bother me when the book makes good use of them—the plots of Romeo and Juliet and Pride and Prejudice might seem hackneyed, too. Patti Stone recycles plot devices we’ve encountered in her past novels, and stuffs the book with more than 50 named characters, but its worst flaw may well be the inexplicable way Beth turns to Pete after the fire. Nonetheless, these problems are forgivable when the book is as readable, entertaining, and engaging as Big Town Nurse.

The Patient in 711

By Elizabeth Wesley
(pseud. Adeline McElfresh), ©1972
Cover illustration by Enric Torres Prat

Pretty Laurie Ames was used to handling dangerous medical crises as a highly skilled nurse—but suddenly a different kind of peril haunted her young life. Behind the heavily guarded doors of hospital room 711 a great scientist lay injured. Foreign agents wanted him out of the way for good, and Laurie knew they might try to reach him through her. Desperately she wondered whom she could trust. Handsome Colonel Hank Romain, whose actions had become so secretive? Dashing playboy Carl Jennings, with his witty repartee and tempting proposal? Or Andy Rogers, the mysterious young patient who had lied about his past? Nurse Laurie Ames was caught in a treacherous web of violence and intrigue—and her only hope for safety lay in a daring gamble of love.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“That Phil Lansing is good with a capital G, in addition to looking like a Greek god. If I’m ever hauled into County General, I can tell you I want him working on me!”

“If it were a movie, one of us would fall in love with whoever all the fuss is about and save his life.”

REVIEW:
Laurie Ames is a 24-year-old RN working at a local hospital and dating Col. Hank Romain, who works at an Air Force compound where a top-secret NASA program investigating space travel to Jupiter is underway. She’s been invited out to interview for the industrial nursing position, but she’s dubious; “She doubted that she could be happy passing out aspirin to scientists and assorted other geniuses whose heads ached from the problems and assorted frustrations of projected space exploration and interplanetary travel.” She’s touring the facility with newspaperman Jack Howard, who’s writing an article about the less-secret aspects of the program. But while the pair is there, an accident occurs and two men are injured. Sean Riordan “just about was The Jupiter Project. If anything truly serious had happened to him, it could have meant failure, or at least months’ or years’ delay.” Now he’s been bashed on the head by who-knows-who and is in a coma, as it happens on Laurie’s floor at the hospital.

On her shift the next day, she finds both accident victims. The genius Riordan is ensconced in the eponymous Room 711, but he’s being attended to by private nurses and doctors and, with several guards outside his door, no one ever gets a glimpse of him. There’s also a car accident victim, Andrew Rogers, who wrecked his car a few miles outside the base. He had an appointment with Col. Romain but never made it, poor thing. Between all these new patients and a shortage of nurses, that means Laurie is on duty an awful lot, so she’s running herself ragged. “Why couldn’t I have become a clerk-typist or a lady lion tamer or an exotic dancer?” Laurie mourns, listing about all the careers open to women in 1972 except teacher and stewardess. But it’s a good thing she’s around, because she notices strange doings, like phone calls from strangers who are trying to find Sean Riordan, shadowy figures on the lawn looking toward his room’s windows, and a sudden preponderance of new staff members. “It was strange that, all of a sudden, County General could find nurses, orderlies, and medical technologists, when for years they had been extremely scarce.” She goes straight to Hank with these concerns, and he rewards her by becoming cold and blowing off dates with her. “Something had changed between them. Almost from the day of Sean Riordan’s injury, Hank had been different.”

She’s also wondering about Andy Rogers, who has no family or friends that anyone can track down. She also wonders why he hasn’t called anyone, now that he’s awake and lucid. “No one should be so utterly alone,” she worries. “She liked him. She maybe could more than like him. The realization, and her thundering pulses, surprised her.” This despite his secret past: “For all anyone knows about him, he might have been born at age 28 in the ambulance that brought him here and he’s willing to leave it that way,” muses Dr. Lansing to Laurie. He remembers an old med-school chum who hails from the same small town that Andy is supposed to come from, and a story that doc told him about an Air Force man named Rogers who married a local gal and then went MIA in Vietnam. “ ‘What are you saying, Dr. Lansing? That Andy is—is an amnesiac?’ She couldn’t bring herself to say ‘married.’ Oh, God, don’t let him be!” But Dr. Lansing thinks he’s worse than married, that he’s a spy who stole the real Andy Rogers’ driver’s license and is “taking all of us for a ride in a troika.” Yikes!

The shenanigans continue apace: New orderlies are caught whispering in the linen closet, a faked “emergency” in the elevator meant to draw staff away from Room 711 fools our stalwart heroine not a second, Laurie tails a strange man sneaking up the stairs and is attacked by him before she fights him off and escapes. Then, five pages from the end, the final scene kicks off unceremoniously when Laurie notices that the door to Andy’s room, usually open ajar, is now closed. She walks in to find two armed men holding Andy hostage—and Andy is soon revealed to be none other than the real Sean Riordan!!! Laurie once again saves the day by managing to press the call button, and the door explodes open and Hank and five security agents subdue the bad guys. It’s an unusual method of answering a call light, but in this instance it certainly comes in handy. Then all that’s left is for Andy/Sean to kiss Laurie, even if it is against hospital regulations, and the book comes to what is actually a sweet ending.

This is a satisfying and pleasant book, even if it isn’t doesn’t have much in the way of camp or sparkling writing. We spend a lot of time with Laurie as she cares for various patients, and we participate in her life in a way that feels genuine. Her growing affection for Andy is a bit out of the blue, as she spends little time with him over the course of the book, and all the various plots and mysterious happenings play out a bit like an author’s to-do list, but these minor flaws don’t detract much from the enjoyable trip that is The Patient in 711.

My Favorite Nurse

By Arlene Hale, ©1968
Cover illustration by Charles Gehm

“My favorite nurse” … that’s the way Roanna Evans’ patients at Rockwell General described her. But Roanna, in turn, became so involved with her patients that, if any of them failed to recover, it was like a dagger in her heart. Dr. Bill Benton, head of the department, was in love with Roanna—but he was extremely worried about her tearful concern for her patients. So he did what he thought best: He ordered her to take a leave of absence. Roanna recovered her spirits in no time. She had taken a new job which made but few demands on her time—and even less on her emotions. Besides, her new boss was very attractive, and often took her out on dates. Suddenly an emergency erupted at Rockwell General. A frantic call went out for every available nurse. Roanna knew that Dr. Bill Benton needed her. … But could she face that ordeal again?

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:
“If you make a woman stop being a woman, it will be a dull old world.”

“It’s indecent for a woman to look so pretty so early in the morning.”

“So you’re the new nurse. I heard you were a looker.”

“She found herself being very thoroughly and expertly kissed.”

“Listen, sweetheart, there’s just one thing I want out of life: fun. A good time. A pretty woman like you.”

REVIEW:
Roanna Evans is the best nurse at Rockwell General Hospital. But she’s on the brink of going down in flames: She cares for her patients so much that every setback is a knife to her heart. But she has this one patient, the crabby old Luther Holland, who in true VNRN is style quite rich. She’s won him over, natch, and now he is insisting that she come work for him at his department store. She’s not convinced that she’s making the right decision, as she feels she is abandoning important work, but she just can’t take it anymore. So she hands in her resignation and walks out, a free woman who apparently doesn’t believe in two weeks’ notice.

Holland’s Department Store has been a local cornerstone for decades, and the shop is looking a little rough around the edges. But Luther refuses to modernize, even when a new, ultra-modern department store decides to open in town. Ted Holland, Luther’s do-nothing son, grumbles a lot that without a little updating, Holland’s is doomed, but his father refuses to listen to him. So Ted comes up to the nurse’s office regularly to cry on Roanna’s shoulder. And ask her out. And kiss her behind closed doors. She seems to like him, but she’s also wary: Another woman on the staff, Claudia Graham, tells Roanna, “Ted Holland has a line from here to there and it’s a very charming one.” She ought to know, because she’s kissing him behind closed doors, too.

Claudia needn’t worry too much, though, because Roanna is determined not to marry until her kid brother, Kenny, finishes medical school. They are, of course, orphans, and she is paying his tuition and living expenses, so the two have sworn to live hermetically until he graduates, so as not to muddle their concentration on his studies. “I won’t waste my time or your money on girls or any other form of recreation,” he promised her when their parents died. (I did wonder why, if money was so tight, they bothered to pay for Roanna’s nursing school at all, since “once she was married, she wanted to stay home, raise a family, be a housewife.”) But oddly, Kenny has moved out of his boarding house and asked her for a loan of $100. What’s up with that?

Further complicating matters is Dr. Bill Benton, who proposes upon learning that Roanna is going dancing with Ted. In response, “she covered her ears with her hands and shook her head. ‘Please, Bill. Don’t say any more.’ ” Poor Bill. But she doesn’t have much time to think about this new development because longtime Holland customer Mrs. Tadmeier falls in the furs department and twists her ankle. Now she’s suing the store, and this could be the bad publicity that will drive all their customers over to that other department store. But detective Roanna soon deduces that Mrs. Tadmeier suffers from hypertension, which causes dizzy spells, and it was one of these that caused Mrs. Tadmeier to fall—not the scruffy carpet. Crisis averted!

Now all she has to do is persuade Ted to man up and talk to his father. “Did she dare say it? Did she dare give him that little push in the right direction? A man resented a woman trying to bend him to a mold. Was Ted weak or was he just groping?” Judging from his dates with Roanna, he seems to be both. But then Luther drops from another attack, and when she and Ted go to visit Luther in the hospital, Ted finally grows a spine and tells his father he is going to redo the store, and you just know that Holland’s will be saved. Another crisis averted!

Next, Kenny shows up and tells Roanna that he secretly got married and used that $100 for a honeymoon. She is pissed! “I’ve deliberately turned away from love, from getting involved! I’ve worked unbelievable hours! All for you, Kenny!” she shrieks. He stomps off, and she goes on a date with Ted, kissing him with new abandon. He seems to like the reckless Roanna and proposes. She’s going to think it over: “Ted could be the answer to all of her problems, even Kenny!” She runs into Bill, who is attending to Luther, long enough for him to tell her that she’s changed since she started working at Holland’s. It’s a pretty astute observation, considering that her crass attitude only erupted a dozen pages ago, but then, Bill’s a really great doctor.

For our next calamity, we learn that the town’s other hospital has caught on fire and that all the patients are being transferred to Rockwell General. Roanna, recognizing a dire emergency, goes back to work at the department store for half a day before visiting Ted’s office, where she finds him kissing Claudia. She resigns on the spot, telling him that she doesn’t really love him and that he and her job at Holland’s have just shown her that “I could never be happy being anything but a nurse at Rockwell General.” At least until she gets married, and that shouldn’t be long, either, because she’s come to realize that “it was Bill she loved!” She heads off to Rockwell, works for ten straight hours, then reports for duty on her regular night shift. She’s just writing a note to Kenny on her coffee break and enclosing her usual check by way of making up for being such a shrew when Bill stops by her table at the cafeteria. A page and a half sets them to rights, and then we can close the book.

Author Arlene Hale wants her heroine to be several things at once. Roanna is often strongly assertive and taking action, such as with the Mrs. Tadmeier situation and when she is trying to steer Ted and Luther back into each other’s arms. But the text of the book wants us to think she’s a mousy wimp, like when she’s wondering if she dares to encourage Ted to talk to his father or with her plans for abandoning nursing to become a housewife. We’re told several times that working at Holland’s has changed her, but right up until her showdown with Kenny, she’s worrying about Luther’s health and what is going on with Kenny, and telling herself that she likes Ted, “maybe more than just a little.” The never-ending plot twists in the book’s final 30 pages felt like a manic to-do list, with little enthusiasm or excitement. It’s sloppy and uninspired writing which, unfortunately, I have come to expect from Ms. Hale. Even more unfortunately, she was ridiculously prolific. Wish me luck.