Collecting Book

Doctor Myra Comes Home

With an office off Park Avenue, a partnership with two established male doctors, Myra Fielding, heart specialist, felt that she had arrived as a doctor. Then Doctor Sam, who had staked her to medical school, came to New York and laid his case before her. He was old and Lake Mills would soon be without a doctor—unless Myra came back. Myra could not imagine what her reception in this small Midwestern town would be. There were only a few—among them, Ross Devon, the high-school coach; Steve Dixon, who owned a farm just outside town; and a bewildered young minister—who were willing to accept Myra on her own terms. It took a major tragedy before Myra was to know the deep satisfaction of what it truly means to come home.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“I aim to see that you don’t forget you’re a woman, as well as a doctor.”

“Come on, now. Don’t go female on me.”

REVIEW:

Arlene Hale was a prolific writer, but unfortunately most of her books were perfunctory at best. Though I wanted to love this book—chiefly for the divine cover illustration, I’ll admit—it is an ordinary story without much heart.

Myra Fielding is a cardiologist in a Park Avenue office with wall-to-wall carpeting and a heartthrob partner who dates her occasionally. Then old Doctor Sam comes a-calling. He is a GP in Lake Mills, the town in which Myra grew up, and he had supported in every way her dreams of becoming a doctor. Now he wants to retire before his bad ticker fells him, and he comes to Myra to ask her to step into his shoes. She just can’t turn down her patron, so she packs her bags and along with her sassy nurse, Liz O’Connor, heads west.

After a couple of weeks of shadowing Dr. Sam, he heads off for some fishing and leaves her in the office … where the crickets are chirping as loudly as they are at the trout pond. Only emergencies will stoop to see this uppity New York woman doctor, but Myra soldiers on and manages every new crisis with a sure hand and an accurate diagnosis, despite the fact that few of her new patients’ diseases have anything to do with cardiology, which she has practiced exclusively for the past three years.

If the patients won’t show up, the men are certainly forming a line outside her door. Coach Ross Devon, whom she meets during athlete screening physicals, finds her attractive, as does Doctor Sam’s nephew, Steve Dixon. Good thing that impossible doctor, Wade Lincoln, who works in the nearby hospital, is such a nasty man, so she doesn’t have to fend him off as well! Oh, wait, even though he fights with her every time they meet, he still feels compelled to grab her now and then and kiss her, which makes it more of an assault than a romantic gesture, but we know that VNRNs never seem to notice the difference.

Things begin to get tense at home in the apartment Myra shares with Liz when Liz also gets a hankering for Steve; sadly, Myra prefers to fight for a man she’s not sure she really wants, possibly sacrificing her best friend and a great professional relationship, rather than let one of her beaux go. On the office front, Myra’s pocketbook gets thinner and thinner, and she’s contemplating going home to New York when a fire at an old school building puts her into trauma mode for about 36 hours straight. Shortly after this episode, every single loose end is systematically and unimaginatively wrapped up in short order. You’ll not be at all surprised to know that the townspeople eventually do warm to Myra, but it isn’t until she has a man in her arms that Myra decides “she had truly come home at last,” because no woman is complete as long as she’s single. It was a disappointing ending in several ways, mostly because it was so perfunctory and soulless. So, like many other Arlene Hale books before this, I have to give Doctor Myra a middling grade, and you no compelling reason to read about her.

Nurse Lily and Mister X

Cover illustration by Jerry Allison

Her first impression was a huge head with silver-white hair, a bristling mustache and fierce eyes. It was like seeing the Eiffel Tower or the Colosseum for the first time after having looked at it hundreds of times in magazines or on post cards. Lily’s professional smile was frozen on her lips. Usually she would approach a patient briskly, her hand outstretched, and introduce herself. She had been taught how to do it in nursing school—with just the right amount of cheerfulness. But this was a man who simply didn’t lend himself to this kind of approach. This was a man who had terrorized the White House, a man even the President was said to be afraid of…

GRADE: A

BEST QUOTES:

“The most perfectly recovered patient necessarily suffers a relapse when confronted with the bill.”

“Dr. DeVries is still in Paris, isn’t he? Cutting up some important Frenchman or other.”

“Do you girls have to wear those white stockings? It ruins the nicest legs.”

“Can you tell me, please, where to go, nurse? I have a bad case of breaking heart and I need very special care.”

“People in love are always a little bit nauseating.”

REVIEW:

This nurse novel has it all: wit, intelligence, camp, brisk pacing, a bit of intrigue, and—the cherry on top—a fabulous title and cover illustration. If you read no other VNRN this year, make it this one (or Nurse into Woman; that would be another good choice).

Lily Sorenson has been chose to special a patient whose presence at Physicians Hospital in New York must remain top secret—hence his designation as “Mister X.” He’s a lion of an international diplomat, along the lines of a Kissinger or a Churchill, who will be negotiating a major treaty in a few weeks. If his enemies find out he is in the hospital recovering from “a delicate operation,” this might undermine his position at the conference and affect global politics for generations to come, because he’s thatimportant. But his recovery is going to take weeks, and during the bulk of this time he’s not allowed visitors, phone calls, newspapers, or television. And that’s not going over well.

But fortunately, Lily is an excellent nurse and a stunning beauty—Mister X is “a connoisseur and a fervent admirer of feminine beauty”—so she alone of all the nurses in New York stands a chance of subduing the great man, who has already roared two other nurses off the job in as many days. Indeed, in minutes, after denying him the newspaper he’s demanding at top volume, Lily has him eating out of her hand. While this is a common plot device in VNRNs, Lily actually deserves it. She has no interest in giving up her career for marriage, banters cleverly with her friends and colleagues, and corrects a State Department official who says that everyone who knows of Mister X’s true identity must keep his mouth shut—“or her,” Lily answers smartly.

With little else to do but sleep, Mister X soon takes an interest in Lily’s personal life, which features a new young man, Andrew Carlton. Mr. Carlton is a reporter who has heard of the hush-hush goings on at the hospital and is introduced to Lily at a party by the young nurse he is dating by way of pumping her for information. He’s instantly smitten with Lily, and recognizes that this poses a serious dilemma: Should he pursue the woman or the scoop? because he can’t have both.

Lily is equally taken with Andrew, and the pair spends a lot of time in silence at her apartment: “ ‘Oh, Andrew,’ she said, after a while.” She’s feeding him misinformation about her patient, as directed by the great X himself, who tells her, “Compared to your love life, Lily, affairs of state become mere trivia.” It’s a comedy of intrigue, deception, and even human interest as we—and Nurse Lily and Mr. X—watch Andrew to find out how he is going to play the cards he is being calculatingly dealt. The story wraps up very neatly, with the final maneuvering by Mr. X putting everything to rights, and the actual ending is as pretty as VNRNs ever get.

The dialogue is superb, starts early, and never lets up. You know you are in for a great ride when Lily is called to the chief of surgery’s office on page five, and a colleague asks if she has done something awful. “Let’s see,” Lily replies. “I was picked up by a patrol car early this morning, lying drunk in the gutter. But they can’t possibly know that already.” This book reminds me of Glenna Finlay’s Nurse Pro Tem, in that they both feature that snappy dialogue reminiscent of a film from 1942. The plot is light and easy, but has enough heft with the question of Andrew’s character to keep it from completely blowing away in the breeze. It would be a perfect companion to a preferably uninterrupted summer afternoon with cosmo, but don’t let lack of either preventing you from enjoying this delightful little book.

Medical Center

By Faith Baldwin, ©1940

Hospitals, white, hygienic, and routined, hid behind their impersonal walls the perpetual struggle for life against death. They have an atmosphere of hushed mystery for most of us. But to those who live in them, doctors, patients, nurses, interns, and a host of others, life behind those walls is urgent and intimate, romance is sudden and strained, human emotions are tuned to the rhythm of birth and death and the intense dramas that lie between. In this many-charactered novel, Faith Baldwin takes you behind the scenes in one of New York’s oldest institutions. Here, among others, are Dr. Bullard, who considered money a sin; Jimmy Davenport, who fell in love with his nurse; Eunice Watson, who was too beautiful and too kind; the mysterious Mrs. Smith whose doctor had told her a big hospital was the best place to hide. Deftly the author brings alive a fascinating new world.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Patricia to you. You don’t know me well enough to be formal.”

“As she dialed her number she read the penciled scrawlings on the walls and wondered that more people weren’t in the psychopathic wards.”

“Married men are either dull, misunderstood, or understood too well.”

“You have to have some worries, just to know that you were alive.”

“You look half dead, and dead doctors are bad diagnosticians.”

REVIEW:

This book is not a true VNRN; it’s a collection of six 60-page novelettes, each starring a different character from the Lister Memorial General Hospital on the West Side of Manhattan. As a fervent fan of the thoughtful, elegant prose in which author Faith Baldwin delivered District Nurse, He Married a Doctor, and Private Duty, I’d been hoarding this book as a pleasure postponed, and if this is not the finest of the quartet, it is easily worth reading, a soothing balm for an afternoon or two.

Dr. Peter McDonald is a renowned diagnostician, almost 40, a devout monk of a physician without time or inclination for a personal life. He’s haunted by his past: He’d fallen in love with a young nurse when he was an intern, but she had died after being misdiagnosed. His faithful office nurse, Lydia Owens, at 26 has worked for him for three years, but he sees her only as the quiet, reliable proficient that she is. Then one day he meets her sister, a 19-year-old train wreck of a nursing student who flirts with all the boys, seldom studies, stays out after curfew—and looks just exactly like Peter’s dead fiancée. You know exactly how this is going to play out, but part of Faith Baldwin’s genius is that you’re still caught up in it, still a bit worried until the final page.

The second story is the best of the lot, which is a bit too bad, since peaking so early in the book makes the other stories seem a bit faded. Pat Weston is an 18-year-old debutante who volunteers at the hospital’s free clinic because she wants to be a nurse, if only she can convince her horrified parents that a career is an acceptable alternative to being a society wife. Clinic doctor Steve Bullard condemns her for her wealth, of course, but she is too snappy to be put down by him. “The sight of a pretty girl—a girl with more than she needs to eat—sitting there at a little desk in the midst of all that misery made my blood boil,” he says by way of a backhanded apology. “She said calmly, ‘It’s nice of you to think I’m pretty.’ ” This subtle, wry wit permeates almost everything Pat says, and this story, too, ends as it should, but with a twist worthy of Pat’s character.

And there are four more. The dietician, Eva Reynolds, is pursued doggedly by the trifling society playboy patient and the solid intern but is interested in neither of them until the intern’s ex-fiancée shows up and tries to reel in them both. Charge nurse Ada Nelson is beaten down by the early loss of her husband and baby, but in caring for the women and babies on the maternity ward comes to realize “that in giving herself once more to an intensely personal life she would find her salvation.” Intern Dick Henderson becomes interested in his patient, Elsie Gordon—and then realizes that her aunt, Linde von Hartwig, was the governess to the family next door to him, more than a decade his senior, whom he had fallen desperately in love with as a 15-year-old boy. Nurse Eunice Watson is sent to special a young boy at home and finds that the wife is a closet alcoholic, desperately unhappy and probably bipolar (though of course they don’t call it that in these novels), and that she is in love with the father and the boy.

Only one of these stories does not have the traditional VNRN ending, and I did wonder that Ms. Baldwin didn’t shake things up a bit more, since the number of stories she included in this volume gave her room to exercise some unconventional options. But all save the narrative of Dr. Dick Henderson is satisfying in itself, traditional conclusions or not, and I wouldn’t have them any other way. One of the book’s nicer small touches is that the characters from one story appear in the others, even if it’s just a quick hello across a crowded cafeteria, creating a feeling of intertwined lives and professional roles as they are in the community of a hospital. I’ve already loudly praised Faith Baldwin’s writing in the reviews of her other three nurse novels, so I won’t go on too much now, but here she gives us the same sweet, steady hand we’ve known elsewhere, though she doesn’t seem to have worked as hard as she has on previous books, the sole exception being the story of Pat Weston. Medical Centerappears to be the last of her nurse novels, I am heartbroken to say, but if you know of another, contact me immediately, and I will dry my tears until the sad day I have closed the cover of that one, too.