Twin Nurse

By Bess Norton (pseud. Olive Norton), ©1959 

Twins, even identical ones, are not always alike in every way; often one is gayer and more vital, the other quiet and thoughtful. This was certainly the case with Mary and Marty McEwan, twin nurses working in the same hospital. The difference showed itself, too, in the twins’ love affairs—one stormy, the other tender and apparently hopeless. Here is a hospital romance with a difference, not only because the story is told by “the quiet twin” herself, but because every character in it, from the humblest patient to the most exalted Consultant, is a real live person whose problems matter. The authentic background is the authors’ own, for she is a State Registered Nurse who knows her setting intimately, and with love.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“I can register refined horror over the top of a mask as well as anyone I know. Sometimes it works, too.” 

“Really, for an intelligent girl, you do behave like a complete moron at times.”

REVIEW:
Mary McEwan is the quiet, “less attractive” twin of a pair who work in a busy, large hospital—her sister Marty had been voted “the prettiest nurse at St. Faith’s,” bizarre in numerous ways. While Mary is hard-working and in chapter one tumbles hard for the new surgeon John Smith, Marty sneaks out a lot and breaks rules. Marty also soon seems to be chasing after John Smith, who initially seems to miss the fact that they are twins and gives contemptuous looks to Mary, which are never explained. Marty seems to have a lot of secrets, and we’re never really told what they’re about, just allowed to watch as the twins seldom interact, though we are told they are—or were—very close.

Soon it comes out that Dr. Grant Ashby has had a car crash, and that a woman was driving, and she was seen running away from the crash toward the hospital. Everyone thinks it was Marty, and she refuses to say what had happened that night, until eventually she confesses to Mary that she had been out with Grant and that he had assaulted her—she has bruises on her shoulders—but she’d gotten away before the crash, and it turns out he’d been driving after all. So a lot of dithering about this incident in the end winds up as not really important to the plot. Which is how much of this book goes.

Mary and John do seem to like each other, and they are kissing before we’re halfway through the book, but then Marty always seems to turn up with John, and it’s not clear whether she’s trying to win John for herself—again, never explained—but Mary assumes this to be the case and decides she can no longer trust Marty. No kidding: Marty has not exactly been forthcoming about anything with Mary, starting with her role in Grant’s car crash, innocent though it was. John eventually sends a letter to Mary saying he wants to cool things down between them, so Mary, somehow apparently believing that this will change everything, takes a trip to London to the church where John had been abandoned as an infant and discovers that he was actually a fraternal twin, though his sister had died. Then Mary is incidentally caught on TV when the Queen passes by en route to somewhere else, and people at the hospital see her on TV, and that’s all there is to that story, even the part about Mary’s side trip to London or John’s being a twin.

Next Mary burns her arm in the surgical instrument sterilizer and gets cellulitis but still insists on working, which means she is a little delirious with fever and says a lot of too-honest things and faints multiple times. There’s a big catastrophe at the end, with multiple key characters requiring emergency medical treatment, and John says he won’t marry Mary unless he knows who is family is, but after she is rendered unconscious for several weeks because of her cellulitis—which does not happen, in case you were wondering—everything works out in the end.

The main problem with this book is that it is an absolute tossed salad of plot points and characters that never amount to much. For example, we are introduced to at least 45 different characters, most of whom are not given either a first or last name, and keeping everyone straight is very difficult. It doesn’t help that Mary seems to be working in a completely different hospital department in every half-chapter, so by the time you sort out her current job and co-workers, she shuttled off to some other corner of the hospital. We are also offered a lot of foreshadowing sentences like “Marty was on the edge of something, she was riding for a fall.” Or, “Quite suddenly I was afraid of Marty’s restlessness, afraid of where it might lead us both.” It’s hard to understand, when you’ve finished the book, what the fall was, exactly, unless you count the accident that happens in the end of the book, which no one could have predicted and certainly wasn’t Marty’s fault. I was surprised to remember that Olive Norton is actually one of the best VNRN authors I’ve encountered—she’s been on the Best Authors list for the last four of the VNRN Awards and had previously never earned less than a B+ grade—but here she seems to have lost her way. I guess even the best of us can’t always be at our best.

Nurse Janice Calling

By Isabel Cabot (pseud. Isabel Capeto), ©1964

Janice Carlisle had come back to her home in New England for one reason—to win the love of the man she had not been able to forget, Dr. Adam McBain. In her new job as visiting nurse, she had many chances to come in contact with the handsome, charming doctor. But she met others as well—notably the brilliant young surgeon, Dr. Ed Sheldon, his life shadowed by a tragic accident. Suddenly Janice’s life was no longer simple. Now there were two men in her life, and when she stumbled upon a frightening secret from the past, she knew she faced a choice that could mean happiness—or heartbreak.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“When I came through that door, I was tied up in knots. Now I feel as if I could go out and lick half a dozen diseases still unnamed.” 

REVIEW:
Janice Carlisle has moved back home to New England after finishing college and nursing school on the West Coast. It must be confessed that a large part of the draw is Dr. Adam McBain, upon whom she’s been crushing since high school. He’d married someone else, but his wife had conveniently died on the table during a routine gallbladder surgery (I have to interject and say this never actually happens) two years ago, so Janice is hoping to help soothe his broken heart. She takes a job as a visiting nurse, and soon discovers that the widow in charge of the VNA, Ruth Hoxsie, is Adam’s new love interest. 

Soon after arriving home again, she meets Dr. Ed Sheldon one morning as he is repairing his car while wearing a tuxedo, and enjoys an ocean swim and coffee with him afterward, but curiously tells her friend later that she finds him annoying. “All that you’ve seen in my eyes, friend, is near rage at the brass of Dr. Sheldon to look at me as if he can’t wait to go a round or two in the back seat of some parked car.”  Even more bewildering, she then notes that he’s “darn attractive,” adding, “I would probably enjoy a session or two of parking with the gentleman myself.” So what’s the problem, then?

Despite her attraction to Ed and Adam’s attraction to another woman, Janice decides to set about “exercising her womanly wiles” on Adam in an effort to win him away from Ruth. This causes some raised eyebrows amongst her friends and colleagues, but Ruth herself doesn’t seem to mind and sends Adam over to Janice’s house for coffee on a regular basis.

Meanwhile, we learn that Ed is a brilliant surgeon who experienced two patient deaths back-to-back: his mentor, and Adam’s wife. Now he can’t operate unless his cocky but inept surgeon partner is in the OR with him, even for a routine appendectomy. When the sidekick decides to chuck surgery for his true passion, research, Ed is left without a career. One can only check her watch to see how long it takes for someone to require emergency surgery for a life-threatening injury and everyone to fall into line after that.

I found this book somewhat puzzling. On one hand, the writing seemed smart, occasionally amusing, and interesting. On the other, the book was overly long, the plot fairly obvious, and the story ultimately unsatisfying. It’s as if the author let us see that she was capable of delivering a stellar book but chose not to. That said, I have to suggest that, if Nurse Janice is calling, you consider whether or not you have any more promising options before you answer.

Nurse Crane … Emergency

By Ann Gilmer (pseud. William Daniel Ross), ©1964

“V” is for Virginia … missing when needed on call … because she was nursing her fiancé … fresh from a drunken brawl.” The cruel verse appeared on the Brentwood Hospital bulletin board the day after Ruth Crane assisted at an emergency operation in place of the regular OR standby nurse, Virginia Roberts. It was the first in a series of “poetic” attacks on various members of the hospital staff—and there was no clue as to who was responsible. But the trouble at Brentwood began at a time when Ruth was already disturbed by something else, something more personal. She suspected her friend, Helen Sherwood, was in love with Dr. Jim Leinster, the brilliant young surgeon Ruth planned to marry. Was it Ruth’s imagination, or was Him beginning to respond? Then the bulletin board poet struck again, and Ruth forgot her suspicions. Because this time his target was Jim, and the charge so serious it could destroy him …

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:
“Perhaps it wasn’t reasonable to expect a girl as attractive as Helen to be too reserved and solemn.” 

“This is why nursing is not an overcrowded profession. Word has gotten around that it isn’t all handsome doctors and gay pulse-taking.”

“You look very sweet in a uniform, Miss Crane. You should wear one all the time.”

REVIEW:
Ann Crane is not actually an Emergency Department nurse … or a surgical nurse, so it’s a little baffling why Dr. Jim Leinster should call for Ann in the middle of the night in a snowstorm to assist in a lobectomy after the usual scrub nurse, Virginia Roberts, didn’t answer her phone when she was on call. His reason for choosing Ann is never explained—maybe the fact that she’s his girlfriend has something to do with it?—but after her single performance passing instruments, she’s asked to join the surgery staff. There she’s on hand to witness the repercussions after a really lame poem slandering Virginia is found tacked to the main lobby bulletin board, with crowds of people clustering around to read it and not one of them thinking to pull it down, not even the nursing supervisor who discovers it. Virginia is accused by the “poet” of staying home to assist her husband after a drunken brawl rather than Jim in the OR, and the following morning Virginia quits in tears. 

The next target is a kindly old repairman, who is accused of stealing supplies. He admits to the charge even though it wasn’t him, because he thinks it’s his son-in-law and wants to protect the younger man. That’s the end of that plot thread, because then a nursing student is accused of being married, which apparently is against regulations, and everyone is worried that she’ll be expelled from the nursing school—what kind of a world was that, when a woman’s marital status could get her barred from school? (She’s just suspended, but sadly she attempts suicide over the whole mess.)

In between all the lunchroom discussions of who the bad poet might be, Ann is worrying about her boyfriend Jim’s inability to pop the question. “There’s nothing I want more than to ask you to be my wife,” he doesn’t exactly explain. “I have a valid reason for delaying things. You’ll understand later.” When the mystery is revealed, it’s not clear why delaying things would make a difference, but there’s not a lot about this book that is clear. For example, the setup of Ann having this great friend in Helen as a best friend is completely destroyed by the fact that Helen is mean and unfriendly. Jim calles her “jealous and spoiled. And at the hospital quite a few people think she’s hard to get along with.” Ann herself agrees that Helen is spoiled, “but she’s been wonderful to me.” If she was in the past, she’s not once in this book.

Eventually, when Jim is targeted—and you knew he would be—his secret is brought to light: He’d been in a bad car crash as a college student and had become a “goofball addict,” as it is so adorably phrased, hooked on barbiturates to manage the post-concussive headaches (clearly the Sacklers hadn’t started pushing OxyContin when this book was written). Though he’d managed to finish his undergraduate degree, medical school, and years of residency, when he’d finally become an attending physician he ran into trouble because the pills made him sleep a lot, so much so that he didn’t answer the phone when an emergency case was brought in and the patient died, another implausible detail in a wildly implausible story—there’s no other surgeon available in the entire hospital? He’d gone to rehab and recovered, but now that everyone knows that he is a recovered addict, his career will be ruined! But Ann reminds him he’s been practicing in town long enough to have built up a solid reputation—and then the phone rings and it’s a woman asking him to remove her gallbladder when he has a free minute, so you know everything is going to be all right.

When the mystery poet is revealed, the answer is as stupid as everything else in this book. The reason why this person would have wanted to target all these people, how they got the information, none of it makes any sense. But when I realized that Ann Gilmer is the pen name of William Daniel Ross, that was the first thing about this whole book that made sense. This is the eleventh book of his that I’ve read—the majority of them earning C grades—and the muddled, ridiculous plot, the flat characters, the constant contradictions (even the distance Ann lives from the hospital varies) all fit perfectly with Ross’s prior work. If the mystery poem element adds a small degree of interest to this book, when the answer is revealed, I just felt like a chump for caring, since it’s clear that Ross didn’t care enough to put together a reasonable motive for the crime. Valentine has proved yet again that it’s a terrible publishing house, with the second-worst overall GPA for its books (only Magnum, which also specialized in horrible covers, is worse, with a D+/C- average*). If this alarming cover illustration doesn’t warn you off, let the author finish the job.

* On the flip side, Perma Books takes the top prize with a B+ average, while Harlequin, Pocket Books, and Bantam tie for second with B averages.

Private Hospital

By Arlene Hale, ©1969 

Lovely, vibrant Lesley Allen, R.N., had always enjoyed her work at Seton Memorial Hospital—that is, until young Eric Seton took over. Almost unwillingly she was attracted to the startlingly handsome doctor—yet every time they met, they would end up fighting. He disturbed her. His romance with wealthy Coleen Snyder disturbed her. Most disturbing of all was that he seemed to be running the hospital into financial trouble from which it might never recover. Did she love this man? Did she hate him? She wasn’t sure. Confused by the logic of her mind and the longings of her hearts, it wasn’t until the hospital situation reached crisis proportions and a human life was at stake that Lesley was forced to make the decision … the one decision she knew would change her life forever …

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:
“Right when I’m supposed to take my break, everything happens.” 

“It gives a doctor pause when it comes to cutting out a man’s heart.”

REVIEW:
Lesley Allen is a small-town girl from Hillsdale, where the old Seton Memorial Hospital has been a local institution for half a century. But now the facility, where she’s been working as a nurse for years, is starting to crumble financially along with its brickwork. Old Dr. Sam Seton, who founded the hospital, has turned over the reins to his handsome grandson Eric, who word has it has condescended to put his plans to join a fancy city hospital on hold for a short time to come prop up the old institution, though it seems only a few short months before Eric pulls the plug on the hospital, which is hemorrhaging money. 

Eric’s a handsome blond on the move, apparently away from Seton as soon as he can shutter the old place, or so the rumor goes. In the interim, he’s snippy, aloof, and smug. Naturally, Lesley has been in love with him from the moment she first clapped eyes on him. “Even when he found fault over nothing, when he greeted her coolly and pointedly would not engage her in a conversation, she had been attracted to the man. How could it be?” Good question! They only argue when they meet—he’s telling her that “a good nurse stays unemotional” when she expresses concern about a patient, and she retorts, “a good doctor has compassion and warmth!”—so Lesley is convinced that Eric will never see her as more than an efficient machine in white oxfords.

One of their patients, Julia Garrett, has a bad heart and two young children, and is permanently installed on Lesley’s floor with a fatal case of the dwindles, as one of the doctors I work with calls it. But Eric has a gleam in his eye and a burning ambition in his belly, and after he’s heard that a heart transplant has successfully performed in South Africa (this is actually true, occurring in 1967), it’s not difficult to guess what is going on in his feverish brain. He persuades Lesley’s brother Bob, a local veterinarian, to perform a heart transplant on a canine patient of Bob’s. Then there are pages of speculation about why Eric is so interested in assisting in veterinary surgery, when a kindergartener could guess what’s about to happen.

And it’s no surprise what’s going to happen between Eric and Lesley, although after Eric kisses Lesley and she tells him she loves him, he pitches a fit because he thinks that his grandfather has picked out Lesley for him. “Forget me, Lesley. Forget this happened! Because I’m not going to be bent into Grandfather’s mold!” he shouts before stomping off. Um, sure, buddy. Overall it’s not the worst book Arlene Hale has written, but she’s given us the classic love interest who’s an ass, and the “mystery” that’s anything but, and the book drags along for 156 pages before all the plot threads are nicely tied up as they so obviously would be. The only actual surprise is who the human heart donor turns out to be, but that’s not enough to bother reading this book.

Nurses Quarters

By Sylvia Erskine (pseud. Peggy Gaddis), ©1953 

As far back as she could remember, Ann Harrelson dreamed of becoming a nurse. Nothing mattered but her training—until she met the handsome, charming—but married doctor. The lovely young student nurse was no match for his mature sophistication. As new and uncontrollable emotions overpowered her, Ann knew she would sacrifice her career, her dream, and her reputation. Then she met Dr. Allan Hall, who offered her the chance to start anew. Ann was faced with a decision that would alter the course of her life. But it was a hospital emergency and emotions laid bare by the crisis that showed her the way.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:
“It always disturbs a man to think that a girl would rather do something else than marry him. Women do like to do something else.” 

“‘From him, a dressing down wouldn’t be hard to take,’ murmured Norah dreamily. ‘In fact—’”

“You’re a nurse, honey. You’re supposed to concentrate on skill and not your hellish beauty.”

“Look here, I’ve had about all of that ‘you’re a doctor’ stuff I’m going to take form you or anyone else.”

REVIEW:
I think this book qualifies as smut novel! I’ve never read one before, but this pseudonym was one used for only four books by Peggy Gaddis; the others, including A Lover for Anne and Farm Hussy (which I for one am going to race out and buy!), do seem to fit the bill. But it must be confessed—though our heroine, Nurse Anne Harrelson, does in fact have sex on multiple occasions with the married Dr. Prescott Thayer, all is carried out offstage, and we’re given only vague sensual language to describe the shocking situation. It is, in fact, far tamer than almost any contemporary romance novel. 

Anne is living at home with her sister and her sister’s husband Bruce, and she and her brother-in-law are lusting mightily after each other, even kissing behind closed doors. But fortunately, she has always wanted to be a nurse and had applied to nursing school, so even though her sister tells her, “you’re a born homemaker, and I think you’re making a mistake to insist on the nursing school. You should be married, Anne. You should have a home of your own and at least one pair of twins,” as though obtaining a husband and twins were merely a matter of shopping the right department store. There is a young man who would like to offer Anne a ring, and fresh off a hot argument with Bruce, Anne is ready to have sex with the guy right there on the beach, but Jim fends the hot-blooded woman off long enough for her to remember that she doesn’t really love him.

So off to nursing school she goes, grumpy and uncomfortable in her starched, nylon uniform until Dr. Thayer offers her a ride home by way of his apartment, feeds her too many drinks, and then bends her over his arm. “You know what you need, don’t you?” he purrs, and she does! “I wouldn’t be much good in my profession if I couldn’t diagnose a simple case of emotional frustration,” he concludes, and three paragraphs later it’s over, “her body relaxed as she had never before been relaxed.”

Then it’s back to the grind of classes, Anne a far more mellow woman, able to enjoy the company of Dr. Allan Hall, who is finishing up the final year of his residency before heading home to take over his father’s practice in a small Georgia town. But eventually she starts getting wound up again, and Dr. Thayer recommends a weekend away in a small town.

Unfortunately, the morning after a passionate night in the motel, a tornado sweeps through a nearby town. Given away by the caduceus on his license plate, Dr. Thayer instead flees for St. Simons when the hotel owner begs the couple to aid the tornado victims, but Anne, just months into her training, stays and works tirelessly to aid the victims—and when more aid finally floods in and she’s free to drop, a newspaper reporter takes a photo of her asleep on a table, and her illicit weekend away is exposed. She’s kicked out of nursing school, but finds a job in a nursing home for indigent elderly, quickly becoming the bestest nursing aide the place ever knew.

Then Mrs. Thayer, in a smart tailored suit and a navy blue lamb’s wool coat, tracks her down and orders her to leave town or she’ll have the home shut down. Anne is packing her bags again when Allan turns up, pissed as hell that she’d run out on him and declaring that he’s in love with her, that she should move to the town where his father works, help out, and marry him when he’s finished with his residency in a few months.

The interesting thing about this book is that Anne’s adventures in the sack are a great burden to her conscience. She is constantly declaring that she is “a no good, shameless bitch!” and “sickened with shame and self-disgust.” It frankly gets a little old to constantly be told that “surely no decent, self-respecting girl would be so stirred by this evil thing, this aching yearning for physical lovemaking.” The men usually don’t agree, including the man she didn’t boink on the beach, who tells her, “What’s so shameless about giving in to the way you feel about a fellow?” Though he does add that they should be married first, and her qualm seems to stem from the fact that she is not in love with the men she wants to shag.  

But Anne does demonstrate strength of character, enough to go back to nursing school when she knows she’s been found out to face the consequences. “This had to be faced before it could ever be put behind her,” she thinks, even as she realizes the career she had wanted so badly will be destroyed. And when the man she decides she really does love shows up to claim her, she does her best to talk him out of it, telling him the entire truth from beginning to end and declaring that she’s “a no-good tramp of a girl no decent man could want around.” Her would-be, of course, continues to declare his love for her—though he admits “I’d give my right arm if it hadn’t happened”—and reminds her that “you’ve had the honest and the decency to confess it and to regret it.” And the doctor in the town she flees to after this confrontation takes the whole story with a shrug. “Were you trying to shock me, child? I’m afraid you’re years too late for that,” he laughs, adding that “the only wrong thing now would be to go on letting it ruin your life. You’ve got a lot of years ahead, and you can make them very find, full of happiness, of services, or you can get yourself all twisted and bitter and warped by useless remorse.” Only a kiss the likes of which she’d never felt before with her beloved cleanses her pure in the end, even if he announces, “it wouldn’t be human to forget that the woman you love has had another man’s lovemaking thrill her.” If it’s still a stain on her character that she’s not a virgin—and we know it would never be a stain on a man’s—at least she wasn’t in love with them! Or if she was, as she said she was with her brother-in-law, she never did sleep with him. Phew! So if this is the ’60s version of a smut novel, it's a little disappointing—more for its relentless morality than for its immorality.

2022 VNRN Awards

Wow, what a year. This is our tenth anniversary, friends, but I’m disappointed to tell you that no glamorous alloy do we merit for this accomplishment; tin or aluminum is our reward, meant to symbolize resilience. Well, resilient we are, to soldier on in our mission to restore the vintage nurse romance novel to its former glory and to frolic in the camp, the sparkly ballgowns, the moody beaux, the humor, and the strength of our nurse heroines.

I will add that this year has also seen my 500^th nurse novel review (the most enjoyable Recovery Room Nurse by William Neubauer; see below) as well as a new venture, Nurse Novels Publishing, which is re-releasing as ebooks the very best of the VNRNs (run, don’t walk, to the web site, and shop your little hearts out!).

And for the fine print: Winners are chosen from the 47 VNRNs I read this past year, which were penned by 36 different authors. The Best and Worst Authors categories includes all the VNRNs reviewed for this blog (516 to date), but only authors with more than one review are included. The Best Books category is packed with old favorites (e.g. Dorothy Fletcher, Olive Norton, Jean Francis Webb III, Florence Stonebraker), while Ida Cook (writing as Mary Burchell) is breaking into the top echelons with a bang. It’s an interesting year for Peggy Gaddis, who has the dubious distinction of gracing both the Best Books and the Worst Books categories (the latter twice, which is not the first time she has done this; see 2010).

In conclusion: Thanks to all who have supported this endeavor with a kind word. It means a lot.

Best Books
1. Nurse Sally's Last Chance, Anne Durham
2. Graduate Nurse, Ann Rush (pseud. Sara Jenkins Cunningham)
3. Hope Wears White, Florence Stuart (pseud. Florence Stonebraker)
4. Surgeon of Distinction, Mary Burchell (pseud. Ida Cook)
5. House of Hate, Dorothy Fletcher
6. Recovery Room Nurse, Rebecca Marsh (pseud. William Neubauer)
7. The Doctor’s Challenge, Marjorie Moore
8. The Nurse from Hawaii, Ethel Hamill (pseud. Jean Francis Webb III)
9. Night Duty at Duke’s, Bess Norton (pseud. Olive Norton)
10. Reach for Tomorrow, Georgia Craig (pseud. Peggy Gaddis)

Worst Books
1. Florida Nurse, Peggy Dern (pseud. Peggy Gaddis)
2. Future Nurse, Peggy Gaddis
3. North Country Nurse, Robert Ackworth
4. Nurse of the Wine Country, Ruth McCarthy Sears
5. Amy Marsh, Star Nurse, Sarah Nichols
6. Nurse Jenny, Margaret Howe
7. Park Avenue Nurse, Adelaide Humphries
8. Community Nurse, Arlene Hale
9. Nurse Harlowe, Jane Arbor
10. Nurse in Residence, Arlene Hale 

Best Authors
1. Noreen Ford (3.9 average, based on 2 reviews)
2. Faith Baldwin (3.8 average, based on 4 reviews)
3. Ida Cook (3.7 average, based on 2 reviews)
4. Marguerite Mooers Marshall (3.7 average, based on 4 reviews)
5. Olive Norton (3.6 average, based on 6 reviews)
6. Maysie Sopoushek (3.5 average, based on 2 reviews)
7. Elizabeth Seifert (3.4 average, based on 3 reviews)

Worst Authors
1. Mary Mann Fletcher (1.5 average, based on 2 reviews)
2. Arlene Fitzgerald (1.6 average, based on 5 reviews)
3. Ruth McCarthy Sears (1.6 average, based on 6 reviews)
4. Zillah Macdonald (1.7 average, based on 3 reviews)
5. Peggy Blocklinger (1.7 average, based on 11 reviews)
6. Kellier, Elizabeth (1.9 average, based on 3 reviews)
7. Virginia K. Smiley (1.9 average, based on 4 reviews)

Best Quotes

“Lena made a quick check of his condition and confirmed the fact that he was in a coma.” 
Behind Hospital Walls, by Ruth Dorset

“I’m just sick that I lost my temper and shot you!”
Betsy Moran, R.N., by Peggy Gaddis

“Number Fifteen has just slopped over herself her new bottle of orange squash and the other dimwit who came with you is making heavy weather of mopping up. Go and see how much you can add to the confusion.”
Nurse Sally’s Last Chance, by Anne Durham

“Just about the time you think the guy’s human, he gets a faraway look in his eye, and then he explains why he prefers to use Sim’s abdominal tenaculum over Kelly’s.”
Nurse in Danger, by Jane Converse (pseud. Adele Maritano) 

“The knowledge that Jimmie would never be a mental case cheered her.”
Nurse Jenny, by Margaret Howe 

“‘Want to hear about the abscess now?’ he inquired, and she forced a look of interest into her face.”
The Hospital World of Susan Wray, by Anne Lorraine 

“You’re a lousy nurse. You stick to too much procedure. Don’t you know that a kiss or two would do me more good than anything?”
Camp Nurse, by Arlene Hale 

“No, I had no special plans. Nothing that couldn’t be arranged, anyway. Eddie Fisher wanted to take me to the New York Hilton for dinner, but I put him off. Some other time, I told him. He was terribly disappointed, but never let it be said I let a colleague down.”
First Year Nurse, by Diane Frazer (pseud. Dorothy Fletcher)

“Whoever would have thought this place would have a homey air? I would call it a definite triumph over the landlord’s intentions.”
Airport Nurse, by Monica Edwards

“If I had my teeth in, I’d bite you, honey.” 
Hope Wears White, by Florence Stuart (pseud. Florence Stonebraker)

Best Covers

Airport Nurse

First Year Nurse, illustration by Harry Bennett

Nurse in Danger

Paula Wayne, Wasteland Doctor

Princess of White Starch

Paula Wayne, Wasteland Doctor

By Isabel Stewart Way, ©1962 

With looks and a figure that belied the seriousness of her profession, young Dr. Paula Wayne had come to the California wasteland to take over her ailing Uncle Eric’s practice, and to join his fight against the come-lately faction trying to put up another hospital in the desert. It was a bitter contest, and old Doc’s will to live hung on the outcome. It didn’t help matters when, unwillingly, Paula fell in love with Dr. Joel Leander, who led the opposition—but the real trouble came with Mike Comarra, richest rancher in the desert. An animal of a man, well-aware of his influence, he threatened to switch his support to Joel if Paula rejected his advances. “Life” to Paula had always meant the antiseptic facts and colored illustrations in her medical books. Now, she faced a reality she was ill-equipped to deal with. It took the primitive desert and emotions burned raw by the sun to mature her, to teach her that as long as there was honey, there would always be the taste of vinegar.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:
“Well, if we have to carry on the fight, I’ve sure got the best of it—with such a gorgeous enemy! No holds barred, I trust?” 

“Fact is, I never did see a woman doctor this close before!”

“Maybe you weren’t an ethical doctor, for those few moments, but you were all woman, and a damned fine one!”

REVIEW:
Dr. Paula Wayne, fresh out of medical school, has come to the desert outside Palm Springs to take over her uncle Eric’s general practice after he is laid low by a heart attack. She’s not exactly excited about the prospect: “There could never be enough challenge for her in the life Uncle Eric lived—managing his small ten-bed hospital and attending his patients who were scattered over a large area of the desert,” she thinks to herself. But she is faced with challenge almost the minute she lands, because the only way she can get out to the small town from the airport is to accept a ride with Dr. Joel Leander, who is her uncle’s arch-nemesis. 

Joel is under the impression that Uncle Eric’s practice and Wayne Hospital are not up to snuff. “The equipment’s out-of-date and it’s inadequate,” he tells her, pointing out that the hospital’s nursing staff is headed by Tori Travis, who has no nursing degree and chronic tuberculosis to boot. Actually, Joel’s explanation seems reasonable, that Eric shouldn’t have complete control of the community’s only medical facility without input from others. Paula thinks so, too—and also that Joel himself is pretty gorgeous. “She had wanted to impress him, she admitted in all honesty, and she had wanted to do it as Paula Wayne, good-looking blonde female, measurements 36-26-34, and not as Paula Wayne, M.D.!” He is impressed, and the pair are soon kissing.

Paula soon finds that Uncle Eric really hasn’t been maintaining a modern practice, when on her first day she meets an old woman with a gallbladder infection and discovers that the woman has few records and fewer tests. “How could her uncle have treated a chronic case like this, over a period of time, without insisting on full GI tests?” It won’t be the last time that she encounters shoddy methods, and slowly she begins to come around to Joel’s way of thinking—until, while reapplying makeup after mussing hers while making out with Joel, she sees a negligee on his bed, and decides this belongs to his nurse, Diane Holsworth, whom he’s also been dating.

This sends Paula into a very peculiar tailspin. “Just what was the matter with her, anyway? Had she suddenly gone neurotic? Or was she what her roommate at General used to prophesy she would eventually become—a frustrated virgin?” Paula “had chosen to remain a virgin, but not strictly from moral reasons,” but because “sexual continence seemed a cleaner, more organized way of life.” But now she thinks if she hadn’t seen someone else’s underthings in Joel’s bedroom she would have slept with him that night, and what seems to be bothering her most is that she “had let him know she was willing and ready to be kissed! So she was a frustrated virgin, after all.” 

Her morality struggle is compounded when she meets rancher Mike Comarra, a commanding presence against whom she is warned by three different women before meeting him, and who immediately make the pass at her despite the fact that he is married and she is only at his house to treat his wife’s migraine, which he attributes to the fact that he wanted to “visit her bedroom.” He asks, “Dr. Paula, just what can you give a man who has a frigid wife?” Well, she can give him a kiss, just six pages after her encounter with Joel. Then things really get interesting, because when Paula tells him it was a mistake, he declares that he is going to throw his support behind Joel Leander’s push for a new hospital if she doesn’t sleep with him. She refuses, and soon Joel is sending out of flyer for a town meeting to discuss building a new hospital, with funding from a real estate pal of Mike’s. It’s not frequently that we encounter such blatant sexual harassment in a VNRN, and this may be the most blatant case I’ve seen to date, actually.

Paula hears that one of the people at the meeting who will speak out against Wayne Hospital is going to bring up Tori’s tuberculosis, so she packs Tori off to Los Angeles for a whirlwind day of tests, which again, Dr. Eric had never bothered to run. At the meeting she steps forward to tell them that Tori doesn’t have active TB, but another lung disease that will eventually require an operation. As fate would have it, Joel is a would-be thoracic surgeon chomping at the bit to establish a dedicated service in the desert for all the folks out there who need pulmonary surgery, which would be likely about five, tops, but what of it? Tori ultimately agrees to have the operation but—and you knew this was coming—only at Wayne Hospital, with Joel as her surgeon! And, at the same time, she calls out Paula for her hypocrisy when Paula wants Tory to tell Eric that she loves him, while holding herself apart from Joel. Tori is a feisty, admirable character who greatly enriches the story.

The book plays out pretty much as expected, but the ending is a sweet twist. The most interesting thing about this book is its discussion of sexual harassment, as much as it’s capable of doing for the time in which it was written. None of the men seem to understand why Mike’s family is no longer a patient of the Waynes, and when Joel makes an inaccurate guess, “A lot you know about it! Paula thought, with a little flare of exasperation. Men didn’t realize all the truth about Mike Comarra.” And when Uncle Eric finds out that Paula has lost Mike’s support, she hints at what had happened, but Eric snaps, “Surely you realized that risk when a female turns doctor! You can hold a man in line, can you? A decent man doesn’t venture past the boundaries a decent woman puts up!” To her credit, Paula thinks, “You certainly are living in the past!” and asks him, “What does Mike Camara know about the rules for a decent man?” Not that it changes anything, because she makes no attempt to out Mike as a sexual predator.

Instead, she tackles the problem from the wrong angle, thinking not about the dynamics of power but instead about sexual desire, her own and other women’s, feeling particularly empathetic when confronted with a Hispanic ranch worker of Mike’s who bears one of his children (stillborn). She also examines her own sexuality, and chastises herself repeatedly for having “betrayed herself as a desire-filled female!” She renews her vows of chastity, deciding that “sleeping around was a careless messy habit,” and then several times she refers to Joel’s nurse as a “hussy” for having apparently slept with Joel. She’s a bit judgmental for a doctor, and her opposing attitudes toward the Hispanic woman and Joel’s nurse are not examined. Unfortunately, Mike is never called out for his behavior, and in the end is reconciled with his wife, though it is doubtful that this is going to improve his behavior. It’s a simplistic attitude, but one that could be understood given that this book predates #metoo by about 55 years.

Ultimately this is the best of the four books of Isabel Stewart Way’s that I have read, with interesting themes and glimpses back on the mores of an earlier time. Paula is a strong, independent woman and an excellent doctor, even though she is “as man-conscious as any pubescent girl!” If the ending is not difficult to foresee, it is also a relief that the male doctors value and lean on Paula’s strength and talents as a doctor, and don’t brush her off as soon as they start to work in partnership with her. Some of the characters are interesting, even if the writing style isn’t especially outstanding. Overall it’s a decent enough book, one worth reading, even if it insists on dismissing the desert as a “wasteland.”