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.

Art Colony Nurse

By Jane Converse, ©1969

It was all so simple … in the beginning. Handsome young Dr. Larry Rhodes wanted a capable nurse; Eileen Bonham, R.N., had all the qualifications. Eileen wanted romance with marital possibilities; Larry had all the qualifications. Simple. Storybook perfect … until the day Eileen discovered the Bohemian art colony on the California coast and nothing seemed duller than life with a successful, hard-working doctor, nothing more exciting than a free-swinging affair with a flamboyant artist. Suddenly Eileen found herself torn between the man and career she’d always dreamed of—and a thrilling, carefree adventure she’d never dared to imagine.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“Nobody bothered to warn me you were beautiful.”

REVIEW:

Eileen Bonham has taken a break from nursing in Los Angeles to spend a few weeks at her parents’ house in northern California, though her parents keep hoping she’ll stay for good. There are no good job prospects to keep her there, however, until local GP Dr. Larry Rhodes advertises for an office nurse. On the interview, she finds him hunky but a bit somber for her taste. Nonetheless she takes the job—well, after she learns Dr. Rhodes is single. After weeks at work, though, she becomes increasingly disenchanted, busy and interesting though the job may be, because Larry hasn’t asked her out yet.

In addition, she soon sees a side of him that she doesn’t particularly care for, when a family of hippies brings in their young son, who has fallen from a tree. Dr. Rhodes, disgusted with the young parents’ lifestyle, terrifies them by painting a horrific description of the lockjaw that will almost certainly ensue, he says, if young Tad Shearer hasn’t gotten his vaccinations. After a few calls to the boy’s pediatrician, it’s found that he’s up to date, but man! What a bummer! Eileen is not impressed with Larry’s deliberate cruelty to the parents, and when they do go out to dinner for the first time, they get into a heated discussion about whether the Shearers have any right to have children, since they are not financially stable and live in an art colony of dubious reputation and plumbing. The date, needless to say, is a fiasco, and Eileen decides that Larry is a rigid square who thinks that only an orderly life is worth living.

Curiously, however, Eileen, chides herself for having “fallen in love with a man whose basic thinking was so at odds with her own,” and she continues to believe that she loves him, even though through many of the ensuing pages it is quite clear that she doesn’t like him one bit. She’s hoping that “some restricting bonds inside him would break, he would sweep her into his arms, and she would reach to the warm, relaxed core of a human being named Larry Rhodes who had only been pretending he was made of wood.” It seems imprudent to wait around hoping that someone you dislike will suddenly change into someone you do like, but maybe that’s just me.

Also curiously, Eileen deliberately decides to do something that would piss off the good doctor: hang out with the Shearers at the art colony. There she meets another irritating ass, Nick Hamilton. Tall and handsome, he has a tendency to sport dandyish outfits such as a white Nehru jacket trimmed with gold braid, tightly fitted black Edwardian trousers, and gray suede boots. Spotting an unattached female with a steady paycheck, Nick proceeds to woo the gullible Eileen. Though she spends many ensuing evenings canoodling with Nick on a picnic blanket in the hills, she is still having Larry over for dinner on occasion despite the fact that she dreads his boring conversation, and again, she chastises herself that “this was the man she was supposedly in love with.” So when Nick announces to the entire colony that the pair are engaged—without having consulted Eileen—“it seemed right, somehow,” and she goes along with it. Really, not one thing in this woman’s love life makes any sense to me at all.

Eventually she tells off Larry, letting him know what a straitlaced dullard he is and that his condescending attitude toward the artists is appalling. Unexpectedly, Larry seems to take her words to heart and soon is inviting her to carnivals and otherwise trying to be less stultifying. She instantly warms to him, but decides that it’s “important to let him know that she liked him (loved him?) for himself, for what he was, and not only for what he was trying, in the hope of winning her approval, to be.” When she’s just spent the last five chapters sneering at how tiresome he is? Then, when Larry proposes, she accepts—now to quickly call it off with Nick before Larry finds out!

It’s just not to be, however, because a tapestry weaver whom Nick threw over for Eileen attempts suicide, and when Larry is called out to save the woman, Eileen’s double engagement comes to light. Eileen has written her letter of resignation to the doctor and is about to clear town when Mrs. Shearer comes to her in the middle of the night—there’s an outbreak of hepatitis at the art colony! Eileen rushes out to the encampment, leaving word with Larry’s love-sick secretary to let him know what’s going on. Needless to say, the jealous secretary fails to pass on the message, leaving Eileen to manage copious infectious bodily fluids alone for almost a day before the situation is revealed. Then the two are working side by side for almost a week to cure everyone, and when it’s over, Larry has a new-found appreciation for the hippies and the art they produce, and for Eileen as well, so she gets her man in the end, after all.

I never understood Eileen’s feelings for either Larry or Nick, so it’s difficult to find any satisfaction with this book. The artist colony and the hippies are a fun bit of cultural time-travel—their vocabularly in particular—and of course the title of this book is pretty superior, so there may be some reason to pick it up. But if you’re looking for a satisfying story, you will not find it in this art colony.

Night-Duty Nurse

Pretty red-haired Karen Hayden was new at the hospital, but already she had a reputation for efficiency and dedication—since work came first in her life … Then one night a tragic explosion brought scores of emergency patients to the hospital. In the excitement Karen was kissed by Clay Palmer—the handsome, aloof new intern all the nurses were whispering about. After that kiss, sensible as she was, Karen could not wipe the moody Dr. Palmer from her dreams. It was only when Clay Palmer turned all his attention toward a female patient that Karen agreed to date the flirtatious Jack Arlen, an ex-patient of her own, and the son of the most influential man in town. But Jack Arlen was more than an irresponsible playboy, as Karen would soon learn—and Clay Palmer was not a man whose kiss she could easily forget ….

GRADE: A-

BEST QUOTES:

“Right now she was all for planned parenthood, though she knew that on the following day she would change her mind.”

“Close my eyes—with you to look at?”

“Did you, by any chance, have surgery for the removal of the heart, and then run away before they could transplant the new one?”

“I’m going to ask those doctors over there to examine you if they want to discover a sensational phenomenon—a living woman without a heart.”

“ ‘I formed the habit of eating early in life,’ she told him, ‘and I don’t seem able to break the addiction.’ ”

“Did anybody ever tell you how pretty you are when you’re angry? I see now why fishwives always keep their husbands.”

REVIEW:

This book opens with a bang—a literal one, as a ship loaded with crude oil explodes in the harbor outside the hospital. “Enemy attack!” gasps our paranoid heroine, Karen Hayden, as she scrambles to her feet. She reports to Emergency, where she is teamed with the dreamy new resident to help a young man with a severe leg injury. Dr. Clay Palmer is back from a stint in Vietnam that seems to have left him rather crabby, as his first remark to her is, “Stop your daydreaming, Nurse!” To his credit, he apologizes in the cafeteria later, but as Karen starts babbling on about how the patient was petrified he would lose his leg: “It’s like being half a man,” she says understandingly, and Dr. Palmer abruptly stalks off.

Karen quickly recovers from this unfortunate gaffe, or at least with us readers, as she’s soon bantering with her friend Lorna with a sense of humor often relegated to minor characters. With Dr. Palmer, however, it’s another story, and the next time they meet he overhears her saying to a group of tittering nurses, “He has a disposition about as sweet as a crabapple!” Awkward! To her credit, however, she immediately apologizes. He asks about new patient Jack Arlen, spoiled son of wealthy Judge Arlen, who’s cracked up his head and his latest sports car and wants Karen to rub his pains away and otherwise gratify his every whim while he’s in the hospital. Dr. Palmer offers to get young Jack a special so as to free Karen from his wiles, but she tosses her head and declares, “I can take care of myself!” In response to this, Dr. Palmer grabs her and kisses her—and when she kisses him back, he pushes her away and says, “All women are vulnerable.” There is just no way to leave this scene with any fondness at all for Dr. Clay Palmer. And we are reminded of this on two other occasions, when Karen recalls “a young, brash doctor who had kissed her to show his superior strength and laughed at her anger.” But—and you will not be surprised to hear it—her heart is constantly racing or doing double flips or hopping and skipping like a frolicsome rabbit, I’m sorry to report, every time he is near.

Soon the wise “old” charge nurse (she’s 40) is telling Karen that Dr. Palmer is in love with her, but she’s finally relented and started going out with Jack, who respects her fortitude, though the two are really just good friends. Dr. Palmer doesn’t know that, however, and starts dating a rich widow: “My advice to any working girl is: ‘Marry for money.’ That’s what I intend to do—if I ever marry,” he tells her. In the meantime, there’s a young girl with a bone cancer in her leg who needs an amputation, and who runs away from the hospital because her mother insists that she’s better off dead than with just one leg: “What man would want to marry a girl with one leg?” she shrieks. But Karen tries to calm the girl down by telling her that “many amputees live normal, happy lives”—a curious about-face from her earlier position. And after a quiet half-hour chat with Dr. Palmer, young Laurie bravely marches off for her amputation, and “a fund had been started by the townspeople to buy Laurie the best leg possible.”

Eventually Jack proposes, and Karen turns him down because she is not in love with him. He suggests it’s because she thinks he’s an irresponsible kid, she essentially agrees, and he speeds off down the street in a huff. Needless to say, he’s later found with the wreckage of his car wrapped around a tree, with a girl “from the wrong side of the tracks” in the passenger’s seat. Karen soon learns that the girl, Nancy Lord, has recently acquired a new last name—she’s Nancy Alden! It turns out that Nancy and Jack had been in love since they were kids, only Jack was too worried about what his father would say to marry her. Karen’s barb, as it happens, was exactly what he needed to pop the question to the right woman. Who is now in surgery having her skull fracture repaired. You’d think this crisis is going to be the one that skates us into the book’s finale, but no—the darned hospital catches on fire, and it’s up to Karen to rescue at least two-thirds of the patients when some of the more skittish nurses abandon their posts. Dr. Palmer, even more heroic than Karen, is the last one out of the building and suffers some burns, but Karen is there to nurse him back to health.

There’s a little bit of the usual “he doesn’t love he” waffling, unfortunately, at the bitter end when the rich widow Dr. Palmer had toyed with briefly returns to the scene of the crime, which mars the ending slightly. But it’s over as quickly as most of the various scenes in this book, which at times gave me a bit of vertigo with its rapid spinning from topic to topic. But overall this is an enjoyable and amusing book, easily worth the two hours it will take you to blaze through it.

Doctor Jane

Book 2 of 6
By Adeline McElfresh, ©1955

Lovely, dark-haired Jane Langford had but one dream—to become a doctor. Orphaned, penniless, she fought her way through her internship in a big, tough, city hospital. A brilliant career lay before her. But tall, handsome Lance Hart—ambitious and socially prominent young lawyer—wanted Jane to renounce her dream, to belong to him alone. This is the story of a beautiful young woman forced to choose between a life of luxury and the stern rewards of her dedicated profession—of her daring quest for the truth which led her into a bitter battle against powerful and evil forces.

GRADE:B+

BEST QUOTES:

“That beautiful head of yours is as empty as the gourds I used to use for birds; nests when I was a kid. You could have a husband and a couple of kids—half a dozen, if you wanted them—but here you sit, waiting to go chasing off in an ambulance or to be called to Emergency.”

“Don’t go clinical on me, Dr. Langford. I don’t enjoy kissing a test tube.”

“I don’t see any royal carpet. Are you sure they’re expecting you?”

“I’m sick! Quick, someone, call me a beautiful doctor!”

REVIEW:

I have seldom been more disappointed by a VNRN than I was when I finished Dr. Jane, Interne, the debut novel in this series about Dr. Jane Langford. I am pleased to say that this follow-up novel does much better, and I have to admit that the cliffhanger is an effective way of propelling you on to the next installment in a series.

When we last left Jane, she had agreed to give up her most fervent dream of being a surgeon at City Hospital to join the staff of one of those posh and distasteful convalescent hospitals for rich neurotic patients. It’s smooth Lance Hart, the object of a schoolgirl-like crush, who has persuaded her to do so, as he had been unable to convince her to abandon medicine altogether, and this seems like the next-best he can do. She had also agreed to marry Lance, whom we know is completely wrong for her. As I said, it was quite an upsetting conclusion for our otherwise strong, dedicated, brilliant, and honorable heroine, and I remain upset that Jane tossed her career in surgery away without any apparent regret, particularly after the extreme dedication and hard work toward that goal we witnessed in Dr. Jane, Interne.

As this book begins, Jane is a year into her tenure at the convalescent hospital, and she is still not married to Lance. She’s not happy, with Lance or her career, but neither does she seem sure she wants to give either up. Furthermore, her emotional growth has been nonexistent, and she agrees with Lance that she would want the word obey included in her wedding vows—though she has gotten where she is today precisely because she has refused to obey, fighting the bromides of the medical establishment about what women should be. She decides to take the weakest form of action, a leave of absence, and goes back to the small town where she grew up poor and orphaned and miserable. Dr. Ed Johnson, the Old Doctor, begs her to temporarily step in for him so he can have the first vacation he’s had in decades—three months, the lucky guy. She agrees, and soon she’s making house calls and seeing patients—and Lance, who drops by from the city to sneer at the small town and make Jane swoon in giddy lovesickness that I should have become somewhat inoculated against after the first book, but no such luck: “Don’t let me go, Lance! her heart cried. Don’t ever let me go!” You see what I mean.

Soon, though, she’s entangled in a scandal, after the wife of the son of the owner of the town’s major enterprise, the box factory, runs over a small child in the street. Jane is the only eyewitness, and swears that the driver, Mrs. Lola Morton, never even swerved or braked as she sped through town. Lance turns up, now an attorney hired by Mr. Morton to hush up the incident and keep Lola out of jail, and begs Jane to drop the case. Though weak in the knees from Lance’s kisses, Jane clings with the barest of fingertips to her conviction and refuses to drop her accusations. Soon the town drunk turns up as a “witness,” clearly bribed to swear Lola did indeed try to avoid the child, and Jane’s patients, whose livelihoods depend on corrugated cardboard, stop showing up for their appointments. Jane is convinced that Lance is behind all this, and the pair stops seeing each other.

Next door, however, is Minister Bill Latham, a calm, dependable type whom Jane likes immediately. He is always supportive of her job, never objects when she has to cancel a dinner date, and even runs helpful errands for her. She’s slowly falling for him, but there’s the small matter of that photograph on his desk of a young woman signed, “With all my love …” God forbid she just ask the man about it.

Most of the book is about Jane’s work with the townspeople, and this works out well for us readers. Jane is quietly humorous, serious, and never foolish, outside of her relationship with Lance (though to her credit, her increasing distaste for him speaks of a similarly increasing maturity in terms of her love life). Her growing love for Bill feels neither sophomoric nor frivolous, the way her feeling for Lance does. Though it’s obvious from the word go how Jane’s decision to leave town for good when Dr. Ed returns from vacation is going to play out, the book overall is so gentle and pleasant that I didn’t mind a little simplicity of plot. So while the opening salvo of the Doctor Jane series had me a bit worried, with this next all is forgiven, and I look forward to Calling Dr. Jane—though if the series stretches on for four more books, somehow I expect that Bill is doomed.

Dr. Jane, Interne

Book 1 of 6

Jane Langford was the only woman in the new crop of interns at City Hospital. She soon found that the great Dr. Gillian, Chief of Surgery, hated women doctors and was using all his power to keep her out of the medical profession. The young male interns watched. Loyal Dr. Clem Bartlett gave her encouragement. Dr. Peter Farley pretended to cheer her on, but hoped she would fail so he could have her to himself. Conniving, cynical Dr. Hal Normal was frankly her enemy … But what of Dr. Tom Waycross—handsome, moody, fanatically dedicated—who stirred such dangerous new emotions in her untried heart?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“The average woman had neither the physical nor the emotional stamina for the often long, long sessions at the operating table; she wasn’t psychologically constructed to dissect, to slice away at human tissue, to saw through bone, or nibble it away with a rongeur.”

“No woman has any business becoming a doctor. More specifically, I feel that no woman has any business becoming a surgeon. Women have neither the physical nor the emotional stamina that Medicine and Surgery, especially surgery, too often demand, even in training, and because they do not possess that physical and emotional strength and stability, they too often expect the way to be made easier for them because of their sex.”

“Hal isn’t such a bad sort, when you forget he’s a louse.”

“I’m sick! Quick, someone, call me a beautiful doctor!”

“The prescription in a case like yours is one glass of water dashed in the face.”

“Don’t kiss me again, not like that, not now—not when I’ve got to go back and do a skull series.”

REVIEW:

Dr. Jane Langford is just starting her (guess) intern year at City Hospital. She’s wanted to be a surgeon since she was a wee lass, and much is made throughout the book of the hard road she’s had in getting to this point: Her parents died when she was in high school and she’s had to work a number of odd jobs to finance her education. Which means that she’s had exactly zero time to cultivate her personal—or love—life. And which explains her rather schoolgirl crush on Dr. Tom Wayford; she pines to hear his name called over the intercom or catch a glimpse of him up on the pediatrics floor. And when they do finally get together, her joy is boundless: “She was locked in Tom’s embrace, and that was all that mattered—all that would ever trulymatter, she told herself.” It’s a little unsettling to see a woman who has dedicated so much to her career thrust it so quickly to the back seat once she kisses a boy.

But her relationship with Tom is fairly peripheral to the story, and though we are reminded from time to time of her excited infatuation, the bulk of the story is about her travails as she passes through the various specialties in the hospital. Though it must be confessed that her travails are more social—a long-time doctor friend, Peter Farley, is always calling her “honey” and kissing her in public, though she feels nothing more than friendship for him (apparently, just telling him to stop!never crosses her mind), and the gossip mill is whirling with the idea that the chief of surgery, Dr. James Gillian, hates women doctors. (One nice touch is that as the book progresses, the story of why he feels this way gradually becomes increasingly embellished through the grapevine, and we’re never quite sure how much of this growing legend is actually true.) Her medical exploits are always exemplary and without fault: She saves a patient in surgery by administering a precordial thump (the two senior surgeons with her at the table apparently forgetting this potentially life-saving gesture), diagnoses a ruptured brain aneurysm in time to save a rich young man, and takes call for days on end without dropping. I do wish she weren’t such a superwoman; you don’t have to be perfect to be a great doctor, even if you are just a woman.

Her big struggle is to convince Dr. Gillian, when she finally ends up on his service, that women can be not just doctors but surgeons, and very good ones, and that he should accept her as a surgical resident next year. She is slowly succeeding at this endeavor, natch, but in the meantime, long hours at the hospital are cooling her ardor for Tom. Then, lo and behold, she meets wealthy Lance Hart, who is almost the only man in the book neither a doctor nor a patient. He’s a lawyer, and he sweeps her off her feet with flowers and candy, and instantly Jane is “acting like a sixteen-year-old with her first corsage”—meaning exactly as she did toward Tom when he first caught her eye. She’s swooning over Lance in a familiar and sickening way: “Oh, Lance, Lance!her heart sang, over and over again. Kiss me again, Lance darling! Don’t ever let me go!” Jane may be a great doctor, but she is a little kid in affairs of the heart.

The rub is that Lance is not wild about her being a surgeon, and is pressing her to dump surgery and join his mother’s convalescent hospital, where wealthy women go to take a little break. Jane has serious doubts: Could she give up her dream “of helping people who needed her desperately because, too often, there was no other doctor to attend them, or a doctor who cared? Could she be happy working with patients who didn’t need her, who didn’t really need anydoctor?” In the last chapter, Dr. Gillian admits he was wrong about women doctors and offers Jane a spot in surgery under him next year—as we knew all along he would. Tom has dropped out of sight long ago, and now all she needs to do is wangle a ring from Lance to make her life complete—which he is suggesting she will only get if she takes the job at the convalescent home.

To author Adeline McElfresh’s credit, she never pretends that Jane is anything but immature in her feelings toward her men. With Tom, “falling in love with him, or thinking herself in love, had been natural.” And nothing changes when she and Tom drift apart and she tumbles for Lance. “It was easy to forget that she had thought herself just as deeply in love with Tom Waycross as she was, now, with Lance. It has been different between her and Tom. This was real,” McElfresh writes, and we can feel the sarcasm in the words. My beef, though, is that both relationships and Jane’s feelings are handed to us on a platter: We witness few conversations, shared activities, or anything that would show why Jane feels as she does. But perhaps that’s part of the writer’s plan, keeping us minimally invested in these relationships to help us feel that neither man is truly right for Jane.

The ending is the most shocking I’ve encountered in a VNRN, but this is the first in a series of six books chronicling the life and loves of Dr. Jane Langford, so we can only assume that Jane gets herself straightened out in Doctor Jane, the next installment. The writing is steady, if not particularly stylized or amusing or campy, and the story is good enough. Again, it would have made for a more thoughtful book if Jane hadn’t been Superman in a dress, and nothing in the story stands out to make this a great book. But it’s an easy, pleasant read, good enough to make me interested in finding out what happens next.

A Nurse on Horseback

When Nora Williams completed her nurse’s training and went home to the lawless West, she was determined to stay in this remote country where a nurse was so desperately needed. But then one day, on a lonely mountain trail, as Nora was riding to a sick child, the silence was shattered by the bark of a gun. Suddenly Nora knew that the bullet was meant for her! Who was trying to keep this dedicated young nurse from her task of helping the poor and defenseless in this wild country?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“Every young girl likes to pretty-up at the end of the day for the evening ahead.”

“I should think such a beautiful girl could demand for more. And having a professional career is not altogether what I had in mind, though probably that will lead to marriage, too—which must be what you most desire for her.”

REVIEW:

It’s true, as advertised on the back cover blurb above, that this book starts off with a fairly literal bang when someone takes a shot at nurse Nora Williams as she ride—horseback, of course—to see a patient not long after arriving in the west to live out her days on her Aunt Til’s ranch. She believes, though, that the shot was made by a hunter, and she’s more concerned about the fact that her horse threw her and then ran off, leaving her with several miles to walk before reaching her destination. And it’s really not much more than a device to place her into close contact with the cowboy who comes riding down the path, Dan Corby. Naturally, Nora draws a gun on him and accuses him of having fired the shot “at my mare—or at me!” which is not what she had just been thinking a few moments earlier. He offers her a look at his gun to show it hasn’t been fired, and when it’s clean, she asks him for a ride and swings up behind him onto his own horse, the floozy.

Anyway, all that and her nursing visit over, Dan takes her home and is promptly hired to be ranch foreman. The ranch is in financial trouble, of course, and the mortgage is owned by banker Burt McCulley, who is pressing Til to sell the ranch. But Til has a trick up her sleeve; a young man who invested all her life’s savings for her is coming to deliver the enormous profits he’s reaped in a week. The day Thomas Jeffries is due on the ranch, Til rides out to meet him, but comes back alone, and Thomas never shows up—until a week later, when he is found murdered in the desert. And it’s discovered that he’d lost all Til’s money to boot! Which means that Til won’t be able to pay off the mortgage, and is a suspect for murder!

To solve both these problems, Nora lies to the sheriff about Til’s whereabouts that day and then dates banker Bart, who proposes on the first date: “I might remind you that if you marry me, all your worries—your aunt’s worries—will be over,” he tells her, the suave lothario. To reassure her that he is not motivated to propose because of her aunt’s property, he points out that she will make a good mistress of his own huge ranch since “you come from good stock.” To her credit, Nora thinks, “You might have thought he was picking out the finest breed of cattle,” but she winds up accepting him anyway, and the fact that this will make her essentially a whore isn’t discussed.

Then Aunt Til fires Dan, for reasons she fails to explain. And starts coughing a lot, and staying in bed, and talking about dying. And confesses that it was she who shot at Nora, because she wanted Nora to go back to the East Coast and never find out that the ranch was heading into foreclosure. It’s an overly lame note that could have been avoided, and it doesn’t even make sense—how could Til possibly hide the fact that the ranch had been lost to the rest of her family, no matter where they are, when she has to find another place to live?

Things go from bad to worse for Nora and her beaux: Dan is arrested for the murder of Thomas Jeffries, because apparently he’d been riding the range that night as well, and Jeffries’ saddlebag is found in Dan’s bunk. And Bart’s unimpressive reputation is further sullied when Nora learns that Bart’s men are burning down the ranches of farmers who won’t sell out to Bart. Then the sheriff shows up at the ranch with Nora’s little gun—the one she’d threatened Dan with in the first chapter, remember?—which was discovered near where Thomas Jeffries’ body had been discovered, and has been found to be the murder weapon. The sheriff is about to arrest Nora when Til—hold onto your hats, friends—confesses to the murder. Before the sheriff can drag her off to jail, however, Til conveniently collapses and dies in Nora’s arms. To top off one perfunctory, obvious scene with another, the final chapter finds Nora nearly drowning in a river, to be rescued by Dan and discovered to have broken off her engagement to Bart.

The problem with this book is that it bitterly disappoints: Early on it manages to depict Dan and his interest in Nora in a completely believable and appealing way, only to totally squander your emotional investment with a whole host of absurd and obvious scenarios that dot the remaining three-fourths of the book. I truthfully mourned the book that could have been. So while I can easily recommend that you pick up this book, I have to also suggest that you strongly consider putting it down again after page 30.

Nurse in Love

By Isabel Stewart Way, ©1963
Cover illustration by Charles Fracé

To Julie Stone nursing was more than a profession. It was a way of life, and she approached it with competence, determination, and dedication. But to handsome Merc Albeny, the intern whom she intended to marry, medicine was only a hobby. His real profession was women. Then, into the tangle of two young lives, came Dr. Dave Banner. Dr. Dave was old enough to advise Julie on affairs of the heart, both medical and romantic—but young enough to care. Nurse in Love is a deeply moving story of medicine and those who practice it. Under each white robe beats a heart you will want to know and understand.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“He wore a beard and his greasy dark hair was ducktail-cut; even his skin had a dingy look. A beatnik—when beatniks were no longer in style!”

“Any girl likes to have a handsome boy friend drop in at such times; it gives her prestige by certifying that she is attractive!”

“A doctor can always make a good impression by coming late, after he’s been delayed by a big emergency!”

REVIEW:

Julie Stone is working at Sea Memorial Hospital in California when she is abruptly told by the nursing supervisor that she is going to take a new job, with local neurosurgeon Dr. David Banner, and will be moving out of the nurse’s dormitory and into an apartment with Dr. Dave’s two other nurses over the upcoming weekend. Uh, OK. Julie “felt a wave of rebellion, and opened her mouth to tell how she felt about the high-handed way the affair had been arranged. But habit stopped her—the habit of taking orders from the Superintendent of Nurses. So she swallowed her resentment and did as she was bidden.” These VNRN heroines really need some gumption.

As further proof of that, Julie is engaged to Dr. Merc Albeny, a brash, charming, attractive intern who won’t marry her until he is established. “She loved Merc—how could she help it?—yet something seemed wrong. Instead of the rapture of being in love, Julie felt irritation and troubled questioning, and a queer vague unhappiness when she was away from Merc and his blond charm.” She’s apparently not accustomed to saying no to doctors, either, or she’d be out of this jam in a jiffy.

In Dr. Dave’s clinic, she meets beautiful, 17-year-old Carlinda Haynes, who has epilepsy and as a result has been all but written off by her wealthy parents, who are so “ashamed” to have an epileptic as a daughter that they reveal the secret they had not even told Carlinda, that she is adopted, lest anyone think she had inherited this shocking disease from either of them. Julie helps convince Carlinda to go through with the long series of tests with Dr. Dave, who she is convinced will be able to cure Julie. Merc, meanwhile, is using Julie to butter up to Dr. Dave, in the hope that the well-established and highly regarded attending will be able to throw the new resident some work with rich patients who might benefit his practice down the road. Julie is horrified by Merc’s grasping ways, but instead of dumping Merc, she just feels disloyal for her unflattering opinions of Merc, and never mind how accurate they may be. Then Merc decides that he can best take advantage of Julie’s growing bond with Dr. Dave by getting engaged—and now that they’re engaged, “It seems foolish to wait, if we still do have to wait,” he says urgently after kissing her “vehemently” on a moonlit beach. Uh, yes, you do, pal.

Back at work, Carlinda is found to have been suffering the effects of an undiscovered subdural hematoma, and one quick brain surgery later, she is back to normal! And so great is their relief at their recovered patient that Julie and Dr. Dave kiss in the clinic hallway! “And it was as if it were the first time she had ever been kissed,” of course! In an attempt to resolve the issues this little episode has raised between them, Dr. Dave decides to tell Julie that he is in love with her. “Can’t we let it go, now? Can’t you bury it, and go on just as we have been going on—working together?” Uh, sure, Doctor. Everything is soon put to rights, however, when in a shocking coincidence of crossed paths, Julie discovers Merc and Carlinda kissing in the gift shop, and Dr. Dave wanders in as well just a minute or two later, and chews out Merc, who is supposed to be on duty in the ED. Carlinda tries to take the blame, but Dr. Dave declares, “A doctor needs will power to refuse, and the ability to make his own decisions,” two qualities, it must be pointed out, that Julie utterly lacks as well. The only possible hope we are given for her is at the very end, when Merc proposes and she declines, and then tells Dave that she wants to marry him and “bear your children,” if you can keep your gorge down when you hear it.

This is a pleasant little nothing of a book, a faint, floral perfume that quickly wafts away. Julie is far too passive and vapid to be an enjoyable heroine, even when she’s pounding on Dr. Dave’s chest in the final pages and he calls her a “spitfire,” the liar. It’s not badly written, and the antiquated ideas—that epilepsy and out-of-style beatniks are mortifying, to name a couple—are amusing, and if you are interested in neurosurgery, you get to witness a couple of well-described surgeries, but that’s really all this book has to offer, apart from a great cover illustration.

Star Lansing−Arizona Doctor

By Ruth McCarthy Sears, ©1971
Cover illustration by Gordon Johnson

Young and lovely Dr. Star Lansing loved the wild Arizona country where she was born and raised. Here she dedicated herself to helping the poor but proud local Indian tribe, raising needed funds by treating wealthy patients at the exclusive Desert City spa. But Star faced an agonizing crisis of loyalty when dashing Air Force Colonel Whittaker Blake swept her off her feet. Whit was determined to install a missile site in the area, despite heated community protests, and he asked Star to be his ally. Could Star side against her own people? Could she lower her standards as a doctor in the name of patriotism? Was she truly loved, or merely being used? It took a dramatic medical emergency, and a startling revelation of character, to help Star find the answer hidden in her heart.

GRADE: C

BEST QUOTES:

“What a gal like you needs is a houseful of rambunctious kids.”

“Why would a beautiful gal like you want to be a doctor, of all things? Nurse, maybe, until the right man comes along. But lady doctors scare off the men.”

REVIEW:

Star Lansing is a doctor who specializes in tropical diseases. Naturally, she’s decided to practice in Desert City, Arizona, where she caters to the well-to-do folks who come to the area for the spas and golf resorts. There’s a large population of poor Indians on the local reservation, and she moans a lot about the abysmal health care they receive, but she’s too busy cashing checks from her rich patients to help at all on that score; her excuse is that she is burdened with the large, insolvent family ranch that she has to keep afloat.

There are two men in her life. Dr. Hugh McEvers is the other local doctor, but he is “disheveled, charmingly irresponsible, and completely incompetent,” not to mention always late, lenient with nurses, and indulgent with his patients. Impossible man! But he’s fun to be with, so she goes out with him on occasion even if “Star wished that Hugh might be more sincere, more reliable, and that she might permit herself to fall in love with him.” Because Star strangely seems to view every man, no matter how unlikely, as a future husband, until circumstances demonstrate what the reader has seen at first handshake, that the guy is utterly and irrevocably wrong for her.

Meet the other man in her life: Col. Whittaker Blake, who has come to town to build the missile to end all missiles, or maybe just the world. It’s called, curiously, Baby Doll, and everyone is patriotically gung-ho about the project except Star. Her first objection to the plant is that it’s brought a lot of foreigners to town: “Poles, hillbillies, Puerto Ricans, Southerners, Mexicans, Armenians—” and these ne’er-do-wells just get drunk and beat up the locals. Not only that, but “movie theaters were deserted, except for the missile men and their bawdy women who clapped through the serious scenes and yelled with mirth at the comic ones.” To make matters worse, their jerry-built housing is causing real estate values to plummet, and “even the Indian and Mexican household help had absconded from domestic jobs, lured by the compensation” offered at the defense plant. And Col. Blake just laughs at her when she brings up these hardships! The nerve!

But he is awfully cute, so Star quickly gets over her indignation and starts flirting, offering to take him horseback riding out at her ranch, her pulse quickening: “She wanted to know this man in whose hands all the military responsibility rested, really know him.” So she dates him when she can, gets crabby when he doesn’t call, and wonders “when would Whit need and want her as a loving woman? And how long must she wait—wait—until every nerve in her body stopped quivering at the sight or nearness of him and she could utter the words forever crying in her heart: Oh, Whit—love me—love me!” Star is, in a nutshell, a shallow tramp.

Anyway, the problem with this little fantasy of Star’s is that every time she’s actually out with Whit, they invariably fight about how hard he drives his crew and how he insists on sham physicals for the workers so as to prevent delays in the schedule, as a regular exam would take everyone off the job for too long. And he thinks Indians are “lazy and incompetent.” But that’s just a minor hiccup for Star, who has visions of nosegays and white organza. She continues to defend Whit, to herself and to the townspeople, telling Hugh that Whit’s “a serious, dedicated person—one who should be an inspiration to all of us,” and never mind about his utter lack of regard for a fellow human being.

Then, out to dinner with Hugh one night, suddenly he’s the one her heart is all a-pitty-pat for—maybe because Hugh looked “better groomed.” Amazing what a comb and a tux can do for a guy, “something so tremendous, so steeped in magic that it was almost unreal.” In a twinkle she decides that if Hugh proposes tonight she’ll say yes, and I decide that I am thoroughly disgusted with Star Lansing, and the book’s just half over. But the fairy-tale ends abruptly when the Colonel crashes her date, so she tells him off—and this has nothing to do with the fact that he’s been out dancing at the country club with other women, and she’s been stewing over it for the last two chapters. Whit’s response is to ask her to marry him, but though fickle Star “would have been filled with a joy too great to deny a week ago,” now she’s not sure. “She had waited for him to call, yearned for the sound of his voice—was it only a week ago? What was she made of?” An excellent question.

As with many VNRNs, an epidemic pops up to put things to rights. Star and Hugh work relentlessly to track down the cause—good thing she spent all that time studying tropical diseases! It’s leptospirosis, passed around by a litter of puppies sired by her own dog, so it’s curtains for all the canines, including hers—not to mention a few of the missile plant workers, but it’s the dead dog that really puts the kibosh on her lust for Whit, as now she holds him responsible for both the dog’s death and the epidemic as well (though I’m not sure I follow her logic). The rest of the dominoes soon fall neatly into place: A new health clinic for the Indians, a happy ending for Whit and Star’s childhood Indian friend, and—best of all—an engagement ring for Star! So everyone is finally happy at the end: Star can die a happy and complete woman, and we can put away for good this overly long novel about a man-hungry, shallow, and annoying doctor.

The Girl in the White Cap

Assignment: With complications ...

Kate Mallory was pretty and red-headed, but as old Dr. John said, “there was no nonsense about her.” That is why he chose her as the nurse for the Vincent case.

The Vincents were a powerful family, and Kate knew that caring for a crippled child in their isolated mansion would be demanding, but her job was not made easier by—

Sam Vincent—the handsome, charming widower who came to need and depend on Kate.

Dr. Sargent—suave and successful, who came to see the baby, but was much more interested in his nurse.

Dr. Peter Vincent—who treated her as a teammate, but who turned out to be the most troubling of all.

GRADE: C+

BEST QUOTES:

“It’s a relief to see a girl with naturally curly hair; also, something that approaches a real female figure.”

“I don’t want every man present to regard my girl as though she were a lollipop.”

REVIEW:

Visiting Nurse was a top-ten VNRN of 2011, which has made me eagerly search out more books by Margaret Howe (see also Special Nurse and Debutante Nurse). Unfortunately, none has lived up to the promise of that first book, and The Girl in the White Cap is more of the same disappointment.

Kate Mallory is a nurse at Vincent Memorial on the OB/GYN ward, caring for the nasty hussy Rita Vincent—she’s married one of those Vincents—who is going into premature labor. She’s pissed as hell that being pregnant has ruined her figure, and none too happy that when she gets it back she’ll be saddled with a squalling brat. Or that the nanny will be. But Rita won’t give us too much trouble—she’s dead six pages in, leaving an overly distraught widower, Sam Vincent, with nought to do but hire Kate to care for his son Daniel.

At home, Sam has nothing to do with the baby; he’s too busy struggling with his conscience, for his physician has decided that it’s Sam’s fault that his wife died: “He indulged her and humored her and accepted her tantrums. High tension and hysterics are poor preparation for what that girl faced.” Making his grief all the more insurmountable is the fact that Daniel has club feet. “A normal child might have healed Sam’s hurt in time, reconciling him to his loss. But what about a child with crooked, deformed feet?” Instead of a romance, this book should be a mystery story—see if you can understand why Sam loved Rita and despises Daniel, and why Kate Mallory is going to tumble hard for a gloomy, rude curmudgeon.

On duty 24/7, Kate soon is hopelessly devoted to baby Daniel—though we seldom see the two together. It wouldn’t be hard at all to draw us a few bonding scenes to demonstrate her attachment to the infant, but instead we’re mostly told about her fondness for him. She’s so fond, in fact, that she decides to leave her post, so that it won’t destroy her to leave him later on. Get it? She tells everyone she’s going, and they even find a replacement nurse—a young colleague of Kate’s who has made no secret of her plans to attempt to win the heart of the rich widower—and then she changes her mind at the last minute, leaving the hospital gossips abuzz with the idea that Kate is in love with Sam. Which she is, but whatever. To squelch those rumors, she dates the baby’s pediatrician, Dr. Ray Sargent, who is one of the creepiest characters I’ve met in a VNRN, who practically screams, “I’m a date rapist!” as he ushers Kate into the car. Having barely escaped one date with him by fleeing on the tractor of a passing farmer, she naturally agrees to see him again but is saved when the baby’s orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Peter Vincent, tells everyone that Kate is engaged to marry him. What a mess!

The ending is a bit of a surprise, though it all makes sense in a satisfying way. But it’s generally a slow read, and if Margaret Howe’s prose is pleasant, it has little witticism or humor here, and not much more of a plot. It’s not a bad book, but it doesn’t really have anything to recommend it.