History Geekery for Steve Rogers

Cherry Ames, Mountaineer Nurse by Julie Tatham (aka Julie Campbell) (1951)
People comment on the fact that Cherry changes jobs so often. I think one of the reasons is that the series is meant to be educational. In this volume, the reader learns how to provide nursing to rural families with little formal educational. How do you convince them to get vaccines, or to not dip a child in a pool at midnight?

Of course the Kentucky mountains mean feuding families, and a feud means a pair of forbidden lovers, and Cherry plays a part in their happy ending. She also tells the grannies that the man buying their hooked hugs is underpaying them and writes her friend Mai who finds a NYC store that pays them fairly.

Davey Logan, Interne by Henry Gregor Felsen (1950)
This begins with young farmboy Davey galloping a horse into town to fetch a doctor, but the doctor won't come and Davey's mother dies, so he decides to go to med school instead of veterinary school. He gets looked down on for being a hick, sees various patients, makes $75 a month, romances fellow interne Janet, and clashes with a reporter. It's less inane than many career books I've read. Its existence is a bit curious - Felson wasn't a doctor and most of his fiction was about hot rod racing.

Davey gets a residency at the Mayo clinic, but he turns it down to start a practice in his village. In the '50s you could start practice after interne year without doing a residency. In fact the characters mention that in some states you can start practice after med school without doing an internship, but I don't know if that's true.

A funny moment is when a surgeon tells Davey it's the right choice to go into Internal Medicine because, "It's the frontier. It's the only branch of our profession with a real future. Look at us surgeons. We've reached our limit. We can cut anything out of the human body that it is possible to cut out. But our field is narrowing, not expanding. Every new discovery these fellows in Medicine make, the surgeon becomes less essential. Yesterday we cut all the time, because Medicine could not cure. Today the so-called miracle drugs cure thousands that once would have needed surgery." That's not happened to surgery in the 1950s!

Beth Donnis, Speech Therapist by Kathlyn Gay (1968)
The first book I've read from the Messner Career Romance for Young Moderns line. Beth (short for Bethesda, not Elizabeth) just graduated and takes a job at the local school. She's an orphan raised by her aunt, a realtor, and there's a subplot about her aunt selling to the father of one of Beth's students, which makes the book a little more interesting than if it were entirely speech therapy. OF course she falls in love with an English teacher named Hal. (Jobs of parents and love interests are an interesting topic to me.)

At one point Beth goes to a teacher's classroom to see why her kids haven't arrived, and the teacher says they're viewing a history film in "the film room." Beth says what about the kids sitting at the desks, and the teacher says they're too noisy and being disciplined. Beth says "that's hardly consistent" but I'm on the teacher's side. You shouldn't have to miss any part of class to do speech therapy or anything similar.

A detail I noted in the author's bio: She was PhT (Putting husband through). "Kathlyn Gay was born in a small town north of Chicago, Illinois, and attended Northern Illinois University at DeKalb for two years. She planned to become a teacher, but met and married a fellow student, leaving school to help out financially while her husband got started in his profession as an elementary school teacher. She began writing the day her nine-year-old daughter was born and sold her first article. Mrs. Gay has been writing professionally ever since and was writer/ editor for a national organization which solicits funds for overseas relief. She is now a full-time free-lance writer publishing both fiction and non-fiction in national magazines."