Collecting Book

Doctor’s Choice

Dr. Bruce Morrow’s beautiful fiancée laughed when she heard the terms of his uncle’s will. “How utterly absurd,” Nina said. “Of course you are not going to bury yourself in a small Southern town and take over the running of a dinky hospital. Dad will build you one right here, if I ask him to.” Bruce knew Nina was right, of course, but he couldn’t help wondering about the pull he felt toward his late uncle’s home town, the hospital he had left him and Nurse Becky Roberts. He was in love with Nina all right, but he couldn’t help wondering why Becky was constantly on his mind and why his resolve to become a rich, big-city society doctor was weakening day by day.

GRADE: B-

BEST QUOTES:

“It’s a long road we travel, you know, and we can’t find happiness if we get on the wrong road.”

REVIEW:

Another not-a-nurse-novel, Doctor’s Choice nonetheless attracted me for its great cover illustration by Robert Maguire. It’s too bad the story inside doesn’t follow through.

Dr. Bruce Morrow is about to marry Nina Neely (say that ten times fast), the spoiled, demanding, and wealthy daughter of his mentor and soon-to-be partner. But out of the blue an uncle, a general practitioner also named Bruce Morrow who works in the quaint Southern town of Maplesville, up and dies. His will leaves Bruce II a large home and captaincy of the local hospital, which Bruce I had endowed. Bruce II is committed to the indolent path he has chosen as society doctor, we are told repeatedly—but we also find out that Bruce holds “a desire long dormant and never fully admitted. Deep within his heart he had always had a desire to be a country doctor.” Furthermore, “he supposed he was in love with Nina,” a supposition that never bodes well for a couple’s long-term success.

Bruce decides to go to Maplesville as a courtesy, to sign away in person his rights to the estate, which will now fall to the uncle’s nurse, 24-year-old Becky Reynolds, who conveniently lives next door. He’s only planning to spend a day, but as it happens, he witnesses the car accident in which the perpetrator and victim is the spoiled, demanding, and wealthy daughter of the crooked mayor of Maplesville. Cheryl’s arm is crushed, and all the local doctors are voting for just lopping it off, but Cheryl would rather die than lose an arm. Bruce confesses that he’d assisted Dr. Neely in saving an arm in a similar case back home, so his 24-hour stay is dragged out to a couple of weeks while he doctors Cheryl and the other former patients of his uncle, with his trusty Nurse Becky at his side.

And you are not going to guess what happens!!! Bruce falls in love with Becky! But he’s one of those dopey types who thinks that he must go through with an unsatisfying career and marriage, and never mind that “the thought of a lifetime with a girl like Nina was very disturbing.” Though he finds “a richness, a contentment, a feeling of well-being here that he did not think he would find elsewhere,” “his sense of integrity would not let him” back out: “He had promised Dr. Neely; he was engaged to Nina; he couldn’t walk out and say he had changed his mind.” Will he come to his senses before book’s end? The tension about killed me!!!

Well, that was a little snarky, but it’s an irritating question to hang a book on. And you’ll never guess how it turns out!!! So OK, you will, and there’s no precipitating event or revelation that brings on Bruce’s complete about-face; he just walks into Dr. Neely’s office and blurts out the truth, and Dr. Neely just says, “If that’s what you want, don’t let anyone change your mind.” So he doesn’t even have to fight for what he wants, and there are no repercussions—apart from a bitter scene with Nina—that keep him from his intended career and bride. While the book isn’t badly written, and I mostly enjoyed the characters (although there is one bizarre detour in which Becky masquerades as someone else for a bit before she is found out, and this is never satisfactorily explained), in the end I was annoyed by both the book’s central “problem” and its resolution. If Bruce makes the right choice in the end by becoming a country practitioner, the choice you should make is to leave this one on the shelf.

New Doctor at Tower General

By John J. Miller, ©1964
Cover illustration by Bob Stanley

It was love at first sight when Surgical Nurse Evelyn Taylor encountered handsome Dr. Hank Young, who came to Tower General with an emergency operation. Right from the start, they seemed to be a team—professionally. Privately, Hank seemed to be more interested in the glamour and glitter of Louise Hayden, daughter of Dr. Dan Hayden, Chief of Surgery. Evelyn knew she couldn’t compete with Louise’s obvious attractions. She could only hope that Hank would see through her superficiality before it was too late. Meanwhile, Evelyn had to go on working beside Hank, assisting him in the dramatic fight for life at every operation, trying to control her emotions when he praised her for her efficiency as a nurse and went on ignoring her desirability as a woman.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“She was too beautiful to die, even if she did drive like a darned fool.”

“Can’t some doctor ever get to this hospital on time?”

“Would you rather kiss me—or spank me?”

“Like all advice, no matter how true, each man usually had to learn his own lesson, the hard way.”

REVIEW:

This is another not-a-nurse-novel that made it into the pile. Our hero is Dr. Henry J. Young, M.D., D.A.C.S. (Diplomate of the American College of Surgeons), as we are introduced in the first paragraph. You can bet when we are introduced to the OR Supervisor, we don’t even get the RN after her name; instead we are told that “Miss” Evelyn Taylor is known as “Elusive Evelyn.” She’s calm, cool, and collected when he comes barreling into the OR with a car crash victim with a shard of glass embedded in her heart, and he condescends to thinking that Evelyn is “remarkable” and “competent,” but needless to say he won’t give her another thought after he meets Louise Hayden, daughter of the chief of surgery: “Long blond hair, a youthful line of bangs partially hiding her high forehead, warm blue-green eyes, long legs and beautifully proportioned figure; they were all part of one breathtakingly beautiful picture.” The shallow bastard.

Now, I shouldn’t be catty. Louise is actually a fine person, which is not usually the case with these not-to-be first girlfriends. She’s 13 years younger than Hank, though, a senior in college at “Swarton,” a rich-girls’ school outside of Boston. She spends her summer attending parties with Hank, and two months later, just as she’s about to go back to school, the couple actually kisses, which means that it’s time to “make plans,” apparently for their wedding. I continue to be amazed at the speed with which these VNRN pairs move, and only pray that it wasn’t really like that in the 1960s.

It’s Hank’s professional duties, however, that make up the bulk of the story. He’s been brought in from Los Angeles County Hospital after extensive training in cardiovascular surgery to whip the surgical residency program at Tower General, somewhere in the Midwest, into shape. It’s a political battle that involves numerous doctors and a board of trustees and different alliances and warring factions, and I won’t bore you with all that, but suffice to say that Hank’s chief nemesis through all his efforts turns out to be his Chief, Dr. Dan Hayden, father of his fiancée. Dr. Hayden just hates change, and vows to keep it out of his hospital to the best of his ability, at least until his daughter winds him around her finger and he relents for her sake.

Then Amos Cole comes in: He’s 54 but looks 65, with a clogged artery in his heart. At the time this book was written, this means increasingly limited activity until the ole ticker just gives out. But Hank had been working in Los Angeles on a new, pioneering surgical technique that would remove the clot from the hardened cardiac artery and restore the patient to good health. Except for one thing: Of the 18 cases they’d done, 14 died on the table, two survived but had no improvement, and two were “cured.” “If the mortality seems terribly high,” Hank explains, “remember they would all have been dead very soon—if we hadn’t done the surgery. We saved two.” Well, says the suicidal Amos, sign me up!

Now the lines in the sand are drawn and deep: Dr. Hayden, who had been warming to Hank, tells him if Amos dies, he will have Hank fired. Louise, caught between two men she loves, is in a tough position, as each of them lies to her in their attempts to win her loyalty: Her father tells her, “He didn’t care about you or me. He was more interested in stealing a patient than he was in my good will or your love,” and Hank tells her that her father “made a mistake on the course of treatment of Amos Cole, and isn’t enough of a man to admit it.” Well, advising against a surgery with an 80 percent mortality rate isn’t a mistake, it’s a judgment call, and Hank, who’s spent the past three years at a research hospital, ought to know the difference.

Louise, young and afraid, tries to talk Hank out of the surgery, and when he balks, she tells him that they’re over, and that she will drag Evelyn’s name through the mud—Hank has gone out for spaghetti a few times with Evelyn, purely on a platonic basis, much to rejected Evelyn’s chagrin. Hank tells Evelyn before Amos’ surgery the next morning that she may be the subject of some vicious gossip, but Evelyn is not upset, she’s thrilled! Because this means that he and Louise are over, and now she has a shot! Hank, too, is suddenly looking at Evelyn with new eyes: “He couldn’t help contrasting her calm assurance of his ability to Louise’s performance of the night before. How could he have been so blind?”

You’ll not be shocked to hear that the operation goes off without a hitch. Louise tries to make up with Hank, but he essentially dumps her by telling her that he’s moving to New York, knowing that she will never leave the Midwest and her father. After the surgery, he celebrates with Evelyn at their Italian restaurant, and asks her to come to New York with him and be his scrub nurse—not quite the proposal she was hoping for, but as the book closes, she knows the real one will be hers one day, as well.

Told from the doctor’s point of view and written by a man, this book lacks the deft touch of some female VNRN writers who bestow more subtlety of feeling upon their characters. Louise is a carefree, vivacious dish—and if she’s not shallow or stupid, she’s not a rich or nuanced character. Evelyn is either heartbroken or efficient. Hank, it must be confessed, is usually angry, unless he’s in raptures over Louise. Hank’s outings with his friend Mike to play handball lack the gentle fondness or the attitude of conviviality that surrounds a night out with the girls in a Lucy Agnes Hancock story. Now, perhaps it’s not fair to chalk up mediocrity of writing to the author’s gender—lord knows, there are plenty of bad women VNRN authors—but none of the gents (Dan Ross, Jean Webb, Richard Wilkes-Hunter) have ever been able to create the same sweetness that Jeanne Judson, Faith Baldwin, Lucy Agnes Hancock, and Maud McCurdy Welch regularly whip up. Just saying. Even if this book were a true VNRN, it’s more concerned about political maneuvering at the hospital than it is in Hank as a person, and so I didn’t find it all that interesting.

Five O'Clock Surgeon

Cover illustration by George Porter

Dr. Stephen Lovett glanced up from the patient on the operating table. “Take a message,” he said, turning to the medical student at his side. Presently the boy reappeared, grinning. “Miss Townsend wants to remind you that the cocktail party starts at five-thirty.” Young Doctor Stephen Lovett’s doctoring hours were from 9 to 5 … no more! His fiancée, Leslie Townsend, saw to that. But then Steve met the lovely nurse, Julie Greenwood. “A doctor’s first duty is to his patients,” she said. Steve had to make a choice. Was he going to be a doctor or a playboy?

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“Surgery fascinates me. I like to feel that I’m in on the miracles you men perform.”

“ ‘People don’t grow up until they’ve had some banging around,’ he observed.

‘Well, bang me around then,’ she replied. ‘I might like it.’ ”

“You could have benefited by a few more spankings in your extreme youth.”

“He didn’t envy the nurses on night duty. There was always that feeling that even the patients in good condition might pass out in their sleep or suddenly go berserk and jump out of windows.”

“I want you to meet Dr. Zeller, Owen. But don’t offer to shake hands with him. Both of his were broken by the Nazis.”

REVIEW:

Dr. Steve Lovett is a surgeon, natch, and engaged to the beautiful and wealthy Leslie Townsend. Her uncle owns an upscale medical clinic that Steve is angling to get into, though his family and friends try to talk him out of it, as apparently it’s more upstanding to be a solo practitioner. I guess the idea is that he’d always have to be sucking up to the older doctors and would never get to do any but the uninteresting cases they’ve tossed him. But this is what he wants—for the moment, anyway—just as for the moment he wants Leslie, who insists he be on time for the parties she throws for her rich friends. What’s a burst appendix when there are canapés and cold martinis to be had?

Curiously, Leslie, though at present a demanding, petulant shrew, has an interesting past: She used to drive ambulances in Burma during the war, which is where she met Steve. The scenes he gives us of her in wartime show a strong and brave woman, one who shoots a ten-foot-long snake when Steve and another soldier are too frozen with fear to draw their guns, who single-handedly rescues wounded paratroopers from the jungle and delivers them to Steve’s hospital, where she offers him quizzical looks when he assures her she won’t have to look at their mangled, bleeding bodies again. “She could take anything, she said, and subsequently he had found that to be true.” The old Leslie revives somewhat when she drives Steve and his scrub nurse, Julie Greenwood, to their Waterboro, Maine, hometown, which has been ravaged by a forest fire, getting them through the police blockade with aplomb—and then drops back to party-girl mode when Steve’s mother and Julie’s brother have been rescued, much to my chagrin. I’m not alone in that sentiment: “She did no real work of any kind, and it often seemed a pity to Steve, for Leslie had brains and talent.”

Julie Greenwood, on the other hand, is the apple-cheeked and dedicated scrub nurse. “She was the sort of scrub nurse a surgeon dreams about, he thought, but seldom is fortunate enough to work with. Her manner was quiet and unobtrusive; she didn’t chatter like some of the nurses; she was so absorbed in the operation that you had a feeling she could step in, if necessary, and help the surgeon do the job.” She has gumption, too; she fights with the mean new OR supervisor and breaks rules to help the surgeons do their work better.

Frontis

The book’s plot drifts amongst several characters in the hospital: Steve’s slimy roommate, who seeks out girls and financial opportunities with as much gusto as he attempts to shirk his duty; the lovelorn lab technician, who is jilted by Steve’s roommate; an orphan with a small bowel obstruction that Steve takes under his wing. These various stories don’t always come to any satisfying—or sometimes any actual—end; the roommate departs for Florida with a rich patient, having suffered exactly no repercussions for his rakish and irresponsible behavior; and even Leslie perfunctorily breaks up with Steve when he leaves her uncle’s dinner party to operate on the aforementioned orphan, never to be heard from again.

This is another one of those not-a-nurse-novel stories that has slipped into the pile, but the cover was so promising I could not resist. Truth be told, the cover seems to have been designed for a book other than the one that lies within it, possibly a more entertaining, campy, and amusing book. As it is, the book we have takes itself a bit too seriously. It’s not a bad story, and not badly written, and indeed approaches the charm of some of Faith Baldwin or Lucy Agnes Hancock’s books. It entertains in an easy fashion, with occasional wit, such as in, “She got her hand back from Owen and moved off down the corridor.” This book is easily worth reading, but it never really does anything with the characters or the story that sets it above the herd. If only it had lived up to the promise of its cover.

Leap in the Dark

Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti

Jeanne Cleary’s eventual destination was the nursing school in London, but on her own for the first time she felt an urgency to sort out the mysterious circumstances of her birth. Born to an aristocratic French woman who had married against her family’s wishes, Jeanne had been left an orphan when her parents died during the war. Now, having just discovered the existence of her French grandparents, Jeanne was determined to have at least one look at her mother’s ancestral home. But Fate was not to be satisfied with just a far-away glimpse. Before she could turn away from the imposing Château de Clémenteaux, Jeanne would become entangled in a series of lies which would bind her to another’s identity … an identity which would keep her from the man she loved, and prevent her from unmasking the imposter who said she was the real Jeanne Cleary.

GRADE: B

BEST QUOTES:

“As for his sister, one could forgive her for being a novelist—that was deplorable and unfeminine, of course, but could be overlooked.”

“We do not know just what we are capable of until we actually do it.”

“Women, like flowers, were meant to be decorative and pleasing. But they were of greater service than flowers. He could enjoy them and make use of them at the same time.”

“Oh, Anne, not you—not you, of all people wearing trousers!”

REVIEW:

For starters, let’s begin by clarifying that this is not a nurse novel. Jeanne Cleary, fresh out of the orphanage—and not just any orphanage, mind you, but a conventorphanage—is on a train in France en route to a nursing school in London when the train pulls into the abandoned station in Vraipoupon. Completely on impulse, Jeanne grabs her small, cheap suitcase containing the handful of meager possessions that are all she has in the world and hops off. She starts walking, and comes to a grand estate. Guess what? It happens to belong to her grandmother, the Comtesse Clémenteaux, whom she has never seen because her mother, after eloping with the English soldier John Cleary, was disinherited by her parents! Even more coincidentally, the cook Emilée, rushes up the path, grabs her, and pulls her in, insisting that she is the nurse Hélène Dubois, who has arrived to care for the blind Comtesse.

Once she claps eyes on the sweet old lady who is her only living relative, Jeanne cannot bring herself to tell the truth and so poses as the nurse—fortunately for her, she’s really more of a companion than a nurse, so not even Dr. Paul Antoine suspects the truth. Naturally Jeanne takes to life at the estate like a duck to water, and she and the Comtesse become as one in spirit. But suddenly, in through the grand entrance marches Anne Cleary, accompanied by the Comtesse’s attorney Jacques Bergerot, who claims Anne is the real granddaughter and heir to the estate! What to do, what to do?

Well, first off, Jeanne falls like a ton of bricks for the suave and shady Jacques Bergerot, the innocent little dope. She has to fall for someone, I guess, and the doctor just finds her irritating from the word go—though we all know what thatmeans. When Jacques kisses her and looks into her eyes—“his commanding and hers submissive,” if you can bear to know—she believes that he is going to marry her. In truth, however, Jacques is cavorting with Anne, who turns out to be the real Hélène Dubois, and a seedy tramp. We know this because she finds life in the country boring, she doesn’t like the Comtesse, and she’s rude to the servants. So Anne is as shocked to encounter Jeanne as Jeanne is to encounter Anne. But of the two, Anne is a lot more resourceful, and she soon searches Jeanne’s room and discovers the documents and photos that prove Jeanne’s real identity and secrets them in her own room—save the passport, which she tosses in the kitchen stove one night when Armand the gardener is too sick to sleep there, as he usually does.

So now Jeanne seems to be completely out of luck; all she will have is Jacques and his love to keep her warm. But as fate would have it, on the night of the big ball when Anne is to be announced as the Clémenteaux heir, Jacques and Anne announce their engagement!!! Jeanne is devastated, of course, but fortunately the good doctor is there to help buck her up, and in witnessing her despair, he realizes, “Damn the child—I am in love with her!” (He is right to describe her as a child; she is 17, and he is in his 30s.) But all is quickly set to rights: The Comtesse declares that she hopes Anne will wear the Clémenteaux family ring, which Anne has never heard of. The Comtesse becomes quite upset over this, and to comfort her, Jeanne slips her hand into the Comtesse’s—who quickly realizes that Jeanne is wearing the ring! Now all we need is for Emilée the cook to show up bearing the passport, which wasn’t actually burned up, and for Paul to declare, “I think I should warn you, Comtesse, that I have decided to marry this troublesome girl at the first opportunity, irrespective of who, or what, she is.” Jeanne doesn’t get to dance at the ball, because she almost fell through the rickety drawbridge fleeing the house when things looked black for her, but that’s a small price to pay.

This book is utterly predictable, but it’s nonetheless entertaining. The story is told from many characters’ points of view, which makes it a bit more interesting, since Jeanne is far and away the most vapid of all the characters. (When Paul’s sister wishes, “If only Paul would marry some nice girl who had no literary or medical ambitions, who wanted nothing in life but marriage and motherhood!” we know beyond doubt, much to our dismay, that Jeanne fits this bill precisely.) So even if the heroine is a bore and the storyline is ridiculously obvious, this book is still worth reading. Now if only it were an actual nurse romance novel.