Eve Cameron, MD
Dr. Eve Cameron, just graduated from medical school, came home to the small Georgia town her family had ruled for generations. There, she took over her uncle’s big country practice—determined to devote her life to the poor. But young, red-headed Matt Sanders, son of an overseer and now superintendent of the paper mills, told her she was only playing doctor. He knew Eve was the glamorous heiress of the Cameron fortune and he couldn’t believe this spoiled girl would persevere in her desperate battle against poverty, disease and vice. Eve Cameron thought she didn’t care what Matt Sanders said. She had no interest in either men or love—
GRADE: B
BEST QUOTES:
“Mighty few people really make the bed they lie in.”
“The kind of courteous you have to try to be is usually worse than out-and-out rudeness, don’t you think?”
“Other girls sat in the swing and talked to boys; she went out and set bones.”
“She felt relaxed for the first time, felt more like a girl than a doctor.”
“As for my killing off your patients, I’m doing it so that you’ll get some rest when you get home.”
“You’d be a real inspiration to any man to get well. Or to have an illness that went on and on.”
“I wouldn’t want to marry Bob if I was going to be horrid looking for the rest of my life. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“I guess I’ll have to teach you about adjectives. You certainly scatter them about with a careless hand.”
REVIEW:
In the great VNRN tradition, wealthy and beautiful Eve Cameron is returning to her tiny home town of Quiet Harbor after having been jilted by Dr. Smoke Jones, who dumped her for a plain, freckled nurse with “a vacant stare.” She’s planning to lie low for a bit and knit her broken heart back together again before moving on to a glamorous job in the city. Arriving home, she discovers that a paper mill has been built in town by her uncle Peter, and it blankets the town in a horrible sour smell—but has also brought jobs and money to town. She also discovers that Matt Sanders, a former grade-school classmate who was “a whiz at arithmetic,” is now the plant supervisor and seems to be carrying a mighty big chip on his shoulder toward her and her well-heeled family. But she doesn’t have much time to think about that opinionated, self-satisfied young man, because her Uncle Rufus, the town doctor, suffers a heart attack and is now out of commission for a couple of months. So she picks up his black bag and starts ministering to the populace.
Matt, meantime, is trying to get a clinic started at his mill, and condescends to ask Eve for her help. She advises him regarding the supplies he’ll need and where to get the best bargains and how to find a good nurse to staff the clinic. The two run hot and cold with each other, one minute all friendly and the next minute flaring with insults, so you can clearly see where that’s going. Curiously, the relationship causes Eve to develop an inferiority complex, and she regularly worries that she is overbearing when she tries to improve the lives of some of the poor folk around her, which her uncle calls “just plain bossiness.” She compares herself to the nurse Matt’s hired, who is “purry and utterly feminine,” and worries that “Matt Sanders hadn’t said she was a woman. Perhaps he didn’t even think of her as one. He was probably one of those dodoes in his thinking who considered a woman who didn’t sweep and wash dishes and iron and cook three meals a day to have forfeited her womanhood. He probably thought of her as—as— She couldn’t think of the word she wanted, but she was sure it wasn’t complimentary or feminine. Darn Matt Sanders anyhow. She’d show him. When he got back she’d show him who was a woman.” She starts fretting about the fact that Matt isn’t going to like her, and at a meeting with him about the clinic, she bursts out, “Do you think I’m unfeminine, unlikable, because I butt into other people’s business, because I try to manage their lives?” Matt sputters in surprise, and she stomps out, humiliated, and vows to leave Quiet Harbor posthaste.
I’ve always had a difficult time with the word feminine. It purports to equal female, but it also includes all the stereotypical ideas of what a woman is supposed to be—delicate, pretty, gentle—all of which are completely artificial and an identity that others have forced on women. So the minute I come across it, up go my hackles—and when its opposite, bossy, is trucked out at the same time, look out! Are men ever called bossy, or is it just in women that initiative, drive, and executive abilities are considered a bad thing? I’m surprised that a woman as smart as Eve Cameron doesn’t see through the paradox she is creating for herself with her anxieties: If she were meek and mild, she certainly could not succeed as a country doctor, so her determination to be more timid so that Matt will like her seems completely at odds with her desire to be a great doctor, not to mention contrary to her very nature. It’s true that, a few pages after her confrontation with Matt, after she’s set up one girl in a poor family to go to nursing school and another to secretarial school, she feels pretty pleased with herself. “It was a good way for a country doctor to be, even if it wasn’t feminine. She’d be careful and try to be tactful in her bossiness, and if no man ever came along that appreciated a woman who wanted things better—well, she’d be a bachelor like Uncle Rufus.” But it’s not a complete victory, as she still feels she has to try to soften her ambition to make it more palatable to potential husbands. And in the end, the issue of her ambition is left unresolved when she and Matt finally hook up and he never weighs in on this central theme.
Overall this is a pleasant book, well-written and entertaining, but not really offering any especial jewels to put it above the madding crowd. Eve is a good character but not a great one, and her anguish over her gumption is irritating to a modern reader and never satisfactorily put away as silliness. I enjoyed following Eve on her rounds and watching her work, performing surgery and delivering babies, and if the back-cover blurb (see above, in italics) was erroneous both in its depiction of her character and of the plot, I think it’s a better book than what we were set up to expect.
Dr. Dorothy’s Choice
By Elizabeth Wesley (pseud. Elizabeth Adeline McElfresh), ©1962
Cover illustration by Lou Marchetti
As a doctor at the Still River hospital and as the bride-to-be of Tom Norman, Dee Bailey had exactly what she wanted in life—to cure the sick and to love and be loved. Then both her career and her love were threatened—one by an ambitious doctor, the other by a beautiful, seductive woman. Both had power, money and cunning behind them. Alone, with only her conscience and her love to guide her, Doctor Dee had to make the decision which would determine not only her own future, but the future of the hospital and the entire Still River community as well.
GRADE: C+
BEST QUOTES:
“Give my best to his greater omentum. Long may it remain unpunctured.”
“One of these times he’s going to cut out his own gizzard when he tries to knife somebody and pat himself on the back at the same time.”
“A doctor needs to unbend, to let his patients glimpse something besides strict asepsis and medicochirurgical knowledge.”
“I’d like that better if you left out the comma. ‘Always glad to oblige Nola.’ There! Doesn’t that sound better?”
“She had missed last week’s appointment for a shampoo and set at the beauty shop because of an emergency in Surgery—a cross that any nurse, surgeon, or anesthesiologist has to bear, because the patient comes first, no matter what.”
“You know my daughter, Tom. She’s young, beautiful, spoiled rotten. She needs to get married, but God help the man.”
REVIEW:
Dorothy Bailey is the granddaughter of a woman whom Dr. Paul Courtney, now 75 years old, once loved. Though Louise chose to marry another man and died of the flu when she was fairly young, Dr. Paul played the role of uncle to her two sons—one of them named after Paul—and this was Dorothy’s father. Dorothy became a doctor, obviously, “because you are, Dr. Paul,” and now works as an anesthesiologist at the hospital he founded, Still River General Hospital in Indiana. He’s thinking of retiring, and is moved to tears at the realizations of “an old man’s dream” when he offers Dorothy—I just can’t bring myself to call her Dee, as the book does—his job as chief of staff.
But there are a couple of wrinkles in this plan. The first is that some of the boy doctors won’t like it, especially Dr. Rod Howell, who is a coldly ambitious but brilliant surgeon who wants the job for himself. The second hiccup is that Dorothy doesn’t want it, though her reasons aren’t completely clear. “I’m an anesthesiologist! I want to go on being an anesthesiologist. I want to marry you and bear your children,” she tells her fiancé, newspaperman Tom Norman, though I’m not clear what her family planning has to do with it. Tom, to his credit, tells her that she can be a wife, mother, anesthesiologist, and chief of staff, “and you can do a bang-up job at each, separately or at one and the same time.” She responds, “Who ever heard of a woman chief of staff?” So my fear is that Dorothy doesn’t want the job because she is too circumscribed by gender roles, somewhat surprising since she has already done so in spades by becoming a doctor at a time when only 6 percent of medical students were women (this was in the 1960-1 school year; in 2012 it was 49 percent[1]).
But Dorothy can’t bring herself to tell Dr. Paul that she doesn’t want the job, so the bulk of the book is about Dr. Howell’s struggles to win it, by fair means or foul, for himself. He circulates a rumor that a surgery he performed with Dr. Paul was botched by the elder doctor, and that’s why the patient died. A seedy drunk, Jake Smith, is found to be spouting loudly at a nearby burger joint that Dr. Paul killed the patient—though everyone knows that Dr. Howell has paid the man to do so. Then Jake is seeing hanging around the hospital, on the same night that Dr. Paul is found unconscious in the stairwell. Coincidence? We think not!
There’s a lot of to-doing about what happened to Dr. Paul, and confrontations between Dr. Howell and Jake, who attempts to blackmail the bad doctor; Dr. Howell and Dorothy, who has been made acting chief of staff during Dr. Paul’s loss of consciousness (what do they do when he’s asleep, or on vacation?); and Tom Norman and Jake Smith, who protests he never touched Dr. Paul! Then it’s just for Dr. Paul to wake up and tell everyone he just missed a step and fell, Dr. Howell to plead guilty to his mad ambition and be forgiven, and for Dr. Paul to tell Dorothy that he knew all along that she didn’t want to be chief of staff—“You’re in love,” he tells her, again as if her personal relationships somehow make her less fit for the job. She never actually voices her refusal; it’s just assumed that she is turning down the position. Dr. Paul “watched Dr. Dee walk into Tom Norman’s arms as if she never wanted to leave them, and he knew he had done the right thing. He had given Dr. Dee the right to make her decision.” A nice tie-in to the title, but seriously, did she ever not have the right to make her own decision? And did she ever make any decision at all? She is essentially just wafted along by Dr. Paul’s decisions, first to make her chief of staff and then to unmake her.
Unfortunately, Dorothy is not a very vital character, without much starch or spice, and I can’t fathom her lack of interest in becoming chief of staff since she never gives any actual reasons as to why she doesn’t want the job. She’s also brought down by her insecurities about Tom, who is the object of slinky vixen Nola Fenton’s desires. Though Dorothy and Tom seem deeply committed, when Nola lies to Dorothy that Tom kissed her “so hard I’m sure it still shows,” instantly the fountain of anxiety is turned on, and we are treated to paragraphs of Dorothy’s fears: “It isn’t true, Dee Bailey, and you know it! she told herself. So stop tormenting yourself. Don’t give Nola the satisfaction. Don’t let her enter a wedge of doubt between you and Tom—there never has been one; you’ve both been so sure of your love, your trust. But had they? Had Tom?” You see what I mean.
Apart from the disappointing fact that the title character is a bit of a dishrag, the book is fairly straightforward, without much sparkle, but not overly boring, either. It has a bit of humor to it in places, which help you get through it. But in general there’s not enough here to bother reading about Dr. Dorothy’s choices—or lack thereof.
[1]Association of American Medical Colleges, “Total Enrollment by U.S. Medical School and Sex, 2008-2012”. www.aamc.org/download/321526/data/2012factstable26-2.pdf
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