HOSPITAL NOCTURNE

    What intrigued me about this book was its publisher. I’m not talking about the paperback publisher, which labeled it a “Dell Romance” and put some smooching medicos on the cover. I mean the original, hard cover publisher, Vanguard Press. Vanguard put out a lot of left-wing books in the 1930s, both fiction and non-fiction. It published James T. Farrell’s Young Lonigan, a Marxist critique of the lower middle-class, in the same year as Hospital Nocturne. So I figured I needed to check it out. (Note to the eagle-eyed: Dell actually did misspell the author’s middle name.)

    Hospital Nocturne by Alice Elinor Lambert. Vanguard Press (1932), 306 pp.
    Carol Maitland is about halfway through her nurses’ training at a large hospital in San Francisco. Sincere and unsophisticated, she had trouble at first trouble fitting in to the constrained institutional environment. Now Carol likes the work and takes particular interest in two patients, one an old codger who sides with the nurses against their supervisors, the other guilt-ridden rich kid who suffers from debilitating seizures. She also enjoys the companionship of two fellow trainees, Enid and Sheila. Carol does not, however, share their enthusiastic involvement with the opposite sex. As her time in the hospital continues, Carol learns more about work and life.
    The author seems to have something more complicated in mind than simply recounting the romances of some nurses. She wants to portray their everyday lives without any false glamour. As she portrays it, the hospital is rule-bound and hierarchical. The patients’ treatment is seldom individualized. The nurses go for days without ever leaving the hospital grounds. Their supervisors are petty and distrustful. The doctors, like all men in authority, are constantly on the make. Many of the nurses are happy to respond. Only Carol, the protagonist, refrains from love affairs, and she does so not for moral reasons but because she fears emotional damage. The story is made up of episodes, most of which are focused on work. In one Carol breaks the rules to reenergize an elderly patient, for example; in another Enid tries to understand a botched abortion. So the novel seems to step out of character when it concludes by neatly tieing up all the subplots. Hospital stories are much more familiar today than they were in 1932. Even so, some modern readers are likely to enjoy the book.