Wilderness Nurse
By Marguerite Mooers Marshall
“I’ve got several murders on my conscience, but they don’t count. All of them were doctors!”
Nurse Denise Burke is dating Larry Randall, an advertising executive who takes her to the Yale-Army football game when she has time for him. But he’s constantly pressing her to marry him and abandon her career, telling her, “You can’t hold me off forever with notions you starch like your uniforms!” She is determined that she won’t abandon the work she loves—until, that is, a string of patients wears her out with their rudeness and unreasonable demands. She goes to chief surgeon Dr. Curtis Steele—a man she deeply admires for his dedication to his patients—to tell him she’s planning on taking a leave of absence, and he replies, “Don’t be a chump! You do as I say!” In her fury, she quits altogether and sets out for her first vacation in years, a sailing trip with Larry up the St. Lawrence River for a month-long fishing trip in Quebec. As the trip is coming to a close, one of the guides gets appendicitis, and she accompanies him to the area’s only hospital and assists with the surgery. The doctor there, Ned Eliot, wastes no time in begging her to sign on for a six-month term as a nurse at the hospital—which she accepts—and in falling for her like a ton of bricks, though she’s not sure about her feelings for him. Then one day while walking out to assist the local midwife in a delivery, she jumps down off a rock and badly breaks her ankle. Now that she’s on the receiving end of Dr. Eliot’s medicine, she is not sure the tentative doctor will be able to prevent a bone infection that would lead to a tragic amputation. But when she appeals to Dr. Steele back in New York for help, will he be man—and doctor—enough to win the fight for her leg, and her heart?
“The novel is well-paced, its writing clear and incisive, and the interest never lags. Denise is interesting and alive, and the same can be said for the other characters. There are vivid descriptions of the country and situations that make good reading for a long evening.” The Province, December 1949