Collecting Book

Dr. Jane’s Choice

Book 6 of 6

Cover illustration by John W. Scott

To hundreds of thousands of readers, Doctor Jane Langford (later briefly married to the Reverend Bill Latham) is the most beloved heroine in all medical romance literature. Sternly incorruptible, but often hesitant as she chooses what is right and what is desirable—a gifted surgeon and general practitioner, but a woman first and foremost—Doctor Jane strikes an answering chord in every reader’s heart, for Jane is more than a dedicated professional, she is a woman needing masculine strength and love. In this present novel, Jane is faced with the most important choice of her life—how she reaches that choice makes for one of Adeline McElfresh’s most engrossing novels.

GRADE: B+

BEST QUOTES:

“Don’t you talk her right arm off, Henry. She might need it in surgery in the morning.”

“She wanted to share his life, divide herself between being Mrs. Dave Riley and Dr. Jane Latham.”

REVIEW:
When we last left Dr. Jane Langford Latham, she was mourning her husband, Bill, killed in Africa by a crocodile, and I am not kidding. She thinks she’s falling for reporter Dave Riley, whom she first met in Africa and who followed her home to Halesville, Indiana, so as to write and wait for her to come around. But Jane isn’t sure, because she really, really loved Bill. So she takes a job at the nearby City Hospital—where she did her residency, by the way (see Dr. Jane, Interne)—as director of outpatient medicine.

In the course of her work, she discovers that a local woman who lives in the seedy part of town performs abortions, and goes on the warpath, declaring that she will “not stop until that woman is found, arrested, jailed.” Perhaps not coincidentally, a young pregnant woman from that same neighborhood is found drowned, and now the book turns into a mystery story. Whodunnit? Well, this local reporter, Charley Lewis, takes up the case, and the book is divided between following Jane and her patients, and Charley in his attempts to track down the girl’s killer.

I could go into more detail about the case and Jane’s success as a doctor despite her gender, but it’s not really important, and if you didn’t figure out what Jane’s Choice is going to be at the beginning of the last book, Dr.Jane Comes Home, then I won’t spoil it for you. The central question for the reviewer and the reader is, should you read these six books? The problem is that they are neither good enough to make the answer a clear yes, nor bad enough to make it an emphatic no. I always appreciate the quiet competence of the writing, which is occasionally humorous, and here we find a little inside joke: “If you two will excuse me, I’ve got Elizabeth Wesley’s new book. About doctors,” says the wife of Dr. Warren, her former attending in Dr. Jane, Interne. (Elizabeth Wesley is, of course, a pen name of Adeline McElfresh’s!)

The books are interesting, but they don’t have a lot of zest or camp to give them sparkle. I enjoyed Jane, but six books about her is a bit much, considering that the format or story of every book was essentially the same: All about Jane and her daily life, and then at the end, a big decision, usually more or less out of the blue, about some man, the “romance” being almost irrelevant to the rest of the book. The mystery that pervades the plot of this book is not a first for the Dr. Jane series—see Calling Dr. Jane—but it’s a bit of a distraction from what is supposed to be the central point, i.e. Jane. So if you don’t have a better book to reach for, go ahead and make the investment in Dr. Jane, but don’t expect her to leap off the page and dazzle you. She’s much too sedate for that.

Prison Nurse

Young Dr. Evan Dale was in prison, paying society’s just price for transgressing its commandments. This courageous outlaw was the man Judy Grayson loved, but when his life hung in the balance, the only person she could turn to was powerful, ambitious Dr. Hartmann, who wanted Judy for himself. Dr. Louis Berg, out of his years of experience as a prison psychiatrist, has written this frank and shocking story of actual life in the twilight world of men stripped of everything but their primitive desires—and of the lovely girl who came to live among them.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“Between fighting off internes who made passes at her in the ward kitchen, evading the attentions of elderly patients with Romeo complexes and parrying the advances of the attending staff, Judy became a nurse and a woman of the world at one and the same time.”

REVIEW:

Judy Grayson’s first job out of nursing school is at the local prison, where she works with Dr. Jack Stewart, the overseeing surgeon, whom she knows from the hospital where she trained. Jack is in love with Judy and wants to marry her, of course, but Judy does not reciprocate Jack’s feelings, even if Jack is a handy guy to have around to take Judy to dinner and out dancing. She is a bit horrified by Jack’s reason for wanting to practice medicine in the prison: “That place is a surgeon’s paradise,” he tells her. “I can get more surgical experience there in one month than I could in six at Medical Center.” She calls this attitude “cold-blooded,” but I find it more practical and, in fact, true; just because you are interested in acquiring experience and seeing unusual cases doesn’t preclude you from providing good healthcare, as Jack is demonstrated to do at the prison on more than one occasion.

In fact, the resident who is supposed to be on call to the prison, Dr. Gustav Hartmann, is really the abomination. He shows up drunk at the clinic, never comes when paged, fails to order life-saving medications despite repeated requests, and is skimming pain medication out of the clinic to sell to Red Mike, the inmate with the warden’s ear. (Dr. Hartmann does not, however, demonstrate any designs on Judy, despite the promises made by the back cover blurb, above.)

Red Mike and his gang have occupied the dormitory that gives onto the hospital ward and is supposed to be reserved for young patients, to protect them from the “wolves” in the general population before they are transferred to the “farm.” There they sleep between linen sheets, dine on steak and wine, and stroll through the hospital—indeed, even the entire prison—at will. If you can believe it, Judy even encounters Red Mike in the city hospital one day, where he has gone on leave to visit a sick friend. Red Mike is so thoroughly in charge of the prison that he even has a hand in Judy’s hiring, telling the warden, “It ain’t often that we get a nifty piece of fluff like that around here, and I’m sorta sizin’ her up for myself. I need a relief from ‘fags.’ You understand now, don’t you? She’s my stuff.” He pays for his luxurious life by selling drugs and whiskey to inmates, and by skimming off prison supplies for the warden’s own fencing business, so there’s no use complaining about the shocking goings-on to the warden, as Judy quickly finds out!

Her ally in all of this is Dr. Evan Dale, who is six months into a three-year sentence for having performed an illegal abortion on a family friend who was going to kill herself if she had to carry the baby to term. So while the book wants us to feel horrified by the concept of abortion, Judy firmly believes that Dr. Dale was justified in performing this one and should not be imprisoned for a “pardonable mistake.” Frequently people who are opposed to something in theory don’t have such a hard time with it when it applies to them personally. Dr. Dale is the “inmate nurse,” and spends his days doing the work that Dr. Hartmann should be doing if he weren’t sleeping off his latest bender. So Dr. Dale spends a lot of time with Judy, and proves his worth early on when she swoons after delivering morphine injections to the prison’s addicts (don’t ask), and he catches her before she drops to the cold, stone floor.

The bulk of the book follows the fates of various inmates, Dr. Dale and Judy’s blossoming romance, and Red Mike’s “sizin’ up” of Judy. It ends fairly predictably, though the prison is allowed to plod along in its corrupt and sinful ways at book’s end. I was quite surprised to find the copyright date of 1934 on this book, which makes it one of the oldest VNRNs I’ve met. It certainly is dated, with its cute slang—can, fish, scratch, wise—all hung with apostrophes like ornaments on a Christmas tree. The nicknames are adorable too: Wouldn’t you like to hang out with Cabaret Lou, Broadway Rose, Frankie the Dope, Tough Tony, Three Ball Johnny, and Ice Wagon Reilly? The book is not badly written, but I think most of its excitement is supposed to be in the drug use and homosexuality, which we are supposed to find “shocking” and even, to quote our heroine Judy Grayson, “disgusting.” At this point in time, however, it all seems fairly straightforward, so unless you’re particularly interested at a look at prisons as they were 80 years ago, this book doesn’t have much to offer.

Nurse against the Town

By Jane Converse

“Murderer” they whispered of the man she loved. Why did the people of Barfield avoid their doctor? Why did they whisper “criminal” about its director, Dr. Jerry Sterling, when they talked of the mysterious death of his beautiful wife, Naomi? And what was driving Naomi’s brother, Henry Barfield, to use his membership on the hospital board to ruin Dr. Sterling? Desperately, pretty Ellen struggled to find the answers. Pitted against her consuming love for Jerry Sterling were the hostility of the neighbors and the terrible suspicious she could not shake free from her own mind. In a story shaken with passion, hiding at its heart a dreadful secret, Ellen Whitaker finds herself all but alone as the nurse against the town.

GRADE: D+

BEST QUOTES:

“Ellen’s mind had posed the awesome questions about Jerry Sterling’s innocence. Her heart answered them.”

REVIEW:

Ellen Whitaker has left her post in Chicago and come back to Barfield, Colorado, her home town, for one simple reason: She is desperately in love with Dr. Jerry Sterling. She knew him when she was just a kid, see—though “the senior class president and undisputed scholastic leader at Barfield High had barely known of a shy, chestnut-haired freshman’s existence”—and was so besotted even then that “his decision to become a doctor had spurred Ellen’s desire to become a nurse.” When he went off to college, she had “lived” for holidays when she might catch “only surreptitious glances” of him—and then she saw nothing at all of him until now, eight years later. Her devotion to Dr. Sterling is held up as an admirable thing, but to me it seems like a very unhealthy obsession.

In the interim, Dr. Sterling married beautiful heiress Naomi Barfield, but she was found dead in a ditch a year later, victim of “an illegal operation,” wink, wink. It’s rumored that she ran around with a lot of men and that Dr. Sterling tried to end her pregnancy but botched the job. Never mind that he has an airtight alibi for the time of death, the locals won’t have anything to do with him or the hospital he runs in town, so it’s uninhabited pretty much all the time. Naturally, Ellen feels this is an opportunity that she should jump into: working at an empty hospital hoping to catch glimpses of Dr. Sterling, who, widower for a year as the book opens, might begin to start looking around any minute now. But since he really only passes her in the hall every now and then, it’s not clear why he might opt for her. While she’s waiting for him to notice her, she befriends Dr. Sterling’s best friend, Porter Hubbard, and they even start dating, though she’s made it clear to him that her heart lies elsewhere.

All this is set up by page 20, and the rest of the book is an endless back-and-forth between Porter and Ellen about how they can help Dr. Sterling and whether Porter can convince Ellen to marry him. Eventually a Dark Secret is brought to light, but it doesn’t really change anything: We still don’t know who killed Naomi. Or actually, we probably do: We find out about an old doctor who had made a small practice of giving abortions, and who had committed suicide “right after that awful thing with Naomi.” But we’ve been aware of him since about midway through the book, so if he’s the killer, neither we nor the townspeople of Barfield should be at all surprised. We don’t know who the father of Naomi’s baby is, nor are we likely to, since it is common knowledge that she slept with pretty much every man in town. Yet, somehow, Dr. Sterling’s reputation is restored, and somehow manages to fall into Ellen’s arms at the end.

After Surf Safari Nurse, brilliant in so many ways, I will cut Jane Converse a lot of slack, but this is a phoned-in job, not worthy of her. Nothing happens throughout the book, the “climax” is actually irrelevant to the plot, and Dr. Sterling is such a complete stranger to both us and to Ellen that her infatuation with him is more than a little creepy. The writing is pleasant, as Jane Converse usually is, but it takes more than good sentences to make for a good story, and Nurse against the Town is anything but that.