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Dr. Kildare #3
The Secret of Dr. Kildare
As Dr. Jim Kildare watches the faith healer put Nancy under his spell, he knows he should turn the quack over to the authorities, but if he does, he would lose this girl who needs him so desperately
- GenresFiction
211 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1940
2 people are currently reading
32 people want to read
About the author
Max Brand
1,828 books136 followersFrederick Schiller Faust (see also Frederick Faust), aka Frank Austin, George Owen Baxter, Walter C. Butler, George Challis, Evin Evan, Evan Evans, Frederick Faust, John Frederick, Frederick Frost, David Manning, Peter Henry Morland, Lee Bolt, Peter Dawson, Martin Dexter, Dennis Lawson, M.B., Hugh Owen, Nicholas Silver
Max Brand, one of America's most popular and prolific novelists and author of such enduring works as Destry Rides Again and the Doctor Kildare stories, died on the Italian front in 1944.
Max Brand, one of America's most popular and prolific novelists and author of such enduring works as Destry Rides Again and the Doctor Kildare stories, died on the Italian front in 1944.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 21, 2022
I had read "Dr. Kildare's Crisis" out of order, in that story Paul Messenger and Nancy are already known, but in "The Secret of Dr. Kildare" these characters are introduced and the majority of the plot in this story. Kildare's parents and Beatrice make up a small part, it is clear Beatrice has not married yet and Mrs. Kildare looks to match her son with his childhood friend. Kildare is more likeable in this story, though his mind to be more on his work than anything, he mentions marriage to one young girl but no actual proposal this time. There is trouble with Gillespie that has a break up between the pair and rumors of Kildare going around the hospital.
Story in short- Carew has asked Kildare to help millionaire Paul Messenger.
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 5
“I’ve told him before and I tell him again: I’ll see nobody! There’s one last thing I can give medicine, and I’ve got it now in the tips of my fingers. It’s almost in my hand if I’m let alone to work at it. What do I care about one patient, when I’m thinking of the lives of ten thousand? Get out!” “Mother, let’s go now. You heard him,” said the boy. “Hush yourself, Michael,” said Mrs. Casey. “We’ll go when we’re sent. Wait for the word!” Her fierce eyes dwelt upon Kildare as Mary Lamont came back into the room with her head bent so that they might not see the tears in her eyes.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 5
“Doctor Gillespie finds himself too occupied,” she reported. Kildare sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and crossed the room in his turn. “I’ll speak to him...” he said.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 11
“But they’re out of the slums, and you’re out of the country.” “I’m born poor, and I’ll die poor. They see that, and it’s what matters.” “Some day you may be a consultant at a thousand dollars a case,” she suggested. “May I?” He smiled at this impossible future. “Well, anyway, money can’t buy the big things. It can’t buy happiness and things like that.” “It can keep them all in damned bright repair, though.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 13
But he had given the warning too late and Kildare caught his shoe on the rough edge of a flat packing box that projected from beneath his bed. The old leather tore like paper. The whole toe of the right shoe was left in tatters. Kildare, looking solemnly down, wriggled his stockinged toes. “Is that your only pair of shoes?” asked Collins. “It is,” said Kildare, “and there goes my party for this evening.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 13
Heavy tape was holding his shoe together when he went down to Mary Lamont with the big, flat box under his arm. She looked like somebody’s sister, not the probation nurse who had been working with him. It was the first time he had seen her out of uniform, and she took his breath. She had on a
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 13
wine-coloured coat of a material as soft as camel’s-hair, and a hat to match with a quill of yellow and orange stuck in a brim that furled up or down by surprise. Also she wore a scarf the colour of sunlight. “You’re too expensive,” said Kildare. “I couldn’t take you even on trial. Put yourself back on the shelf, Mary...I mean, seriously: Look what’s happened to my shoes, and now the only show I can take you to is a secondhand shop.” She refused to stay behind in the hospital, however. The best of any
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 14
party was simply to get out in the open, she said. So she walked over with him to the express office, where he sent off the Fair model to his mother in Dartford. Then they were in a cellar store buying for two dollars and eighty-five cents a pair of half-soled shoes that once had cost ten or twelve. “Now what? A moving picture?” he asked. “No. We can’t talk in a moving picture.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 16
“Do you mean that he’s in danger?” she asked. “Of course he is. Every old man is suffering from an incurable disease–I mean old age itself is a disease. There’s my own father out there in the country in need of a sort of help that I can give him; but he’s only an ordinary man. A Gillespie–why, every month or day that’s whittled away from his life is a gift that’s gone from
Note | Page 16
*** Kildare is helping Gillespie in the hospital and Mary is still his nurse. His income is very limited and he worries about Gillespie's health.
❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌spoiler alert
Kildare is told by Gillespie's nurse that he is running the old doctor to his death. Kildare decides that he will take up Messenger's case of his troubled daughter, so Gillespie will get rest. Nancy Messenger has changed her behavior that it troubles her father and fiance Charles. Nancy does not like to sleep at night and goes from party to party. Messenger introduces Kildare as the son of an old friend and Jimmy does not tell his true identity because of Nancy's fear of doctors because of her mother's death when she was 10. Gillespie thinks Kildare has gone for money as well as Mary Lamont and the whole hospital. Nancy trust Kildare until she sees him save a boy's leg from amputation. Messenger is mad at him because Nancy can not be found. Kildare is disheartened but searches for Nancy and finds her blind. She had thought she was dying of a brain tumor because she had headaches, and her mom had died of one. Kildare thinks Nancy has had a shock which causes the loss of her sight which he helps cure. Gillespie and Kildare are back together.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 17
MARTHA KILDARE wangled it SO that Beatrice Raymond came over to see the box opened when Stephen Kildare brought it home before lunch. Mrs. Kildare knew that Jimmy and Beatrice, without the slightest malice on either side, had turned their lives away from one another, and she was perfectly convinced that eventually she woulld be able to arrange a match between them; in the meantime she did what she could to keep them fresh in one another’s memory. Jimmy’s note read: “Dear Mother, I’m passing on to you a present given to me by a patient who knows that interns can’t take money. Maybe you have room for it somewhere. Anyway, there are things like this going on in town, so why don’t you come to look at them and let me see you at the same time?” That was all the note said.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 17
“You see,” said the mother, “he doesn’t write letters. He doesn’t know how to write letters.” Beatrice Raymond smiled at her. She said: “You don’t have to explain him, Aunt Martha. You don’t have to apologise either. I was reading in a book about young men the other day, and now I know all about them.” “Do you?” asked Martha Kildare, watching the smile of the girl. “Yes. The book says that they’re only half real.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 17
“What’s the other half composed of then?” “Legend,” said Beatrice. “But what legend, my dear?” “The legend of what they want to be or think they are.” “Did you read that or discover it for yourself?” “I may have dreamed it,” confessed Beatrice Raymond.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 21
I believe you have had a coronary occlusion. You ought to go to bed and stay there for a long time. Bed rest for two or three months is my idea for you, and this should be followed by a complete change of occupation to remove all stress and strain. My dear Steve, it is a terribly unpleasant duty for me to say that you may live ten seconds or ten years, but the chances for the ten years are not so good. Tell me when I may come to see you, and we’ll talk over all the details.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 21
The scientific terminology had kept Beatrice stumbling until she came to the last paragraph, but this was expressed in such layman’s language that its meaning was all too clear; her voice lowered as she proceeded with the reading. The thousand wrinkles of pain in the face of Mrs. Kildare made her look down, and she did not look up at once after reaching the signature, and she still was trying to draw words into her mind when she heard the steady, firm voice of
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 21
Mrs. Kildare saying: “I suppose it’s the end.” “What will you do?” asked Beatrice pitifully. “Everyone manages to get along somehow. If we can’t run, we can walk. If we can’t walk, we can creep. If we can’t creep, we can lie in bed and remember better days. But Jimmy must not know. Not a breath of it must come to him, or he’d throw up his career and come home to help.”
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 22
“Why not?” asked the mother fiercely. “We’ve tried to help him forward. Are we going to hinder him now simply because we’ve lived too long? I’d rather we both dropped dead–now–this instant!”
*** Kildare has sent his mother a handmaid item which a patient gave him instead of money. Beatrice reads his letter and knows it is over with her and Jimmy but his mother hopes for a match. Dr. Kildare the father has crumpled up a letter from a doctor that examined him saying he must rest because his heart is weak.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 25
“I’d hate to ask him for time off,” said Kildare slowly. “I know,” nodded Carew. “You’re afraid that he’d blow your head off.” “No, sir. He’d give me as much time as I want–if I ask him seriously.” “Now you amaze me!” “But the fact is that when I’m not here he does the work of two men. He doesn’t sleep. He burns himself up. And he’s not young, you know.”
Story in short- Carew has asked Kildare to help millionaire Paul Messenger.
➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖➖
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 5
“I’ve told him before and I tell him again: I’ll see nobody! There’s one last thing I can give medicine, and I’ve got it now in the tips of my fingers. It’s almost in my hand if I’m let alone to work at it. What do I care about one patient, when I’m thinking of the lives of ten thousand? Get out!” “Mother, let’s go now. You heard him,” said the boy. “Hush yourself, Michael,” said Mrs. Casey. “We’ll go when we’re sent. Wait for the word!” Her fierce eyes dwelt upon Kildare as Mary Lamont came back into the room with her head bent so that they might not see the tears in her eyes.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 5
“Doctor Gillespie finds himself too occupied,” she reported. Kildare sighed, shrugged his shoulders, and crossed the room in his turn. “I’ll speak to him...” he said.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 11
“But they’re out of the slums, and you’re out of the country.” “I’m born poor, and I’ll die poor. They see that, and it’s what matters.” “Some day you may be a consultant at a thousand dollars a case,” she suggested. “May I?” He smiled at this impossible future. “Well, anyway, money can’t buy the big things. It can’t buy happiness and things like that.” “It can keep them all in damned bright repair, though.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 13
But he had given the warning too late and Kildare caught his shoe on the rough edge of a flat packing box that projected from beneath his bed. The old leather tore like paper. The whole toe of the right shoe was left in tatters. Kildare, looking solemnly down, wriggled his stockinged toes. “Is that your only pair of shoes?” asked Collins. “It is,” said Kildare, “and there goes my party for this evening.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 13
Heavy tape was holding his shoe together when he went down to Mary Lamont with the big, flat box under his arm. She looked like somebody’s sister, not the probation nurse who had been working with him. It was the first time he had seen her out of uniform, and she took his breath. She had on a
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 13
wine-coloured coat of a material as soft as camel’s-hair, and a hat to match with a quill of yellow and orange stuck in a brim that furled up or down by surprise. Also she wore a scarf the colour of sunlight. “You’re too expensive,” said Kildare. “I couldn’t take you even on trial. Put yourself back on the shelf, Mary...I mean, seriously: Look what’s happened to my shoes, and now the only show I can take you to is a secondhand shop.” She refused to stay behind in the hospital, however. The best of any
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 14
party was simply to get out in the open, she said. So she walked over with him to the express office, where he sent off the Fair model to his mother in Dartford. Then they were in a cellar store buying for two dollars and eighty-five cents a pair of half-soled shoes that once had cost ten or twelve. “Now what? A moving picture?” he asked. “No. We can’t talk in a moving picture.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 16
“Do you mean that he’s in danger?” she asked. “Of course he is. Every old man is suffering from an incurable disease–I mean old age itself is a disease. There’s my own father out there in the country in need of a sort of help that I can give him; but he’s only an ordinary man. A Gillespie–why, every month or day that’s whittled away from his life is a gift that’s gone from
Note | Page 16
*** Kildare is helping Gillespie in the hospital and Mary is still his nurse. His income is very limited and he worries about Gillespie's health.
❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌❌spoiler alert
Kildare is told by Gillespie's nurse that he is running the old doctor to his death. Kildare decides that he will take up Messenger's case of his troubled daughter, so Gillespie will get rest. Nancy Messenger has changed her behavior that it troubles her father and fiance Charles. Nancy does not like to sleep at night and goes from party to party. Messenger introduces Kildare as the son of an old friend and Jimmy does not tell his true identity because of Nancy's fear of doctors because of her mother's death when she was 10. Gillespie thinks Kildare has gone for money as well as Mary Lamont and the whole hospital. Nancy trust Kildare until she sees him save a boy's leg from amputation. Messenger is mad at him because Nancy can not be found. Kildare is disheartened but searches for Nancy and finds her blind. She had thought she was dying of a brain tumor because she had headaches, and her mom had died of one. Kildare thinks Nancy has had a shock which causes the loss of her sight which he helps cure. Gillespie and Kildare are back together.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 17
MARTHA KILDARE wangled it SO that Beatrice Raymond came over to see the box opened when Stephen Kildare brought it home before lunch. Mrs. Kildare knew that Jimmy and Beatrice, without the slightest malice on either side, had turned their lives away from one another, and she was perfectly convinced that eventually she woulld be able to arrange a match between them; in the meantime she did what she could to keep them fresh in one another’s memory. Jimmy’s note read: “Dear Mother, I’m passing on to you a present given to me by a patient who knows that interns can’t take money. Maybe you have room for it somewhere. Anyway, there are things like this going on in town, so why don’t you come to look at them and let me see you at the same time?” That was all the note said.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 17
“You see,” said the mother, “he doesn’t write letters. He doesn’t know how to write letters.” Beatrice Raymond smiled at her. She said: “You don’t have to explain him, Aunt Martha. You don’t have to apologise either. I was reading in a book about young men the other day, and now I know all about them.” “Do you?” asked Martha Kildare, watching the smile of the girl. “Yes. The book says that they’re only half real.”
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 17
“What’s the other half composed of then?” “Legend,” said Beatrice. “But what legend, my dear?” “The legend of what they want to be or think they are.” “Did you read that or discover it for yourself?” “I may have dreamed it,” confessed Beatrice Raymond.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 21
I believe you have had a coronary occlusion. You ought to go to bed and stay there for a long time. Bed rest for two or three months is my idea for you, and this should be followed by a complete change of occupation to remove all stress and strain. My dear Steve, it is a terribly unpleasant duty for me to say that you may live ten seconds or ten years, but the chances for the ten years are not so good. Tell me when I may come to see you, and we’ll talk over all the details.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 21
The scientific terminology had kept Beatrice stumbling until she came to the last paragraph, but this was expressed in such layman’s language that its meaning was all too clear; her voice lowered as she proceeded with the reading. The thousand wrinkles of pain in the face of Mrs. Kildare made her look down, and she did not look up at once after reaching the signature, and she still was trying to draw words into her mind when she heard the steady, firm voice of
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 21
Mrs. Kildare saying: “I suppose it’s the end.” “What will you do?” asked Beatrice pitifully. “Everyone manages to get along somehow. If we can’t run, we can walk. If we can’t walk, we can creep. If we can’t creep, we can lie in bed and remember better days. But Jimmy must not know. Not a breath of it must come to him, or he’d throw up his career and come home to help.”
Highlight (Yellow) and Note | Page 22
“Why not?” asked the mother fiercely. “We’ve tried to help him forward. Are we going to hinder him now simply because we’ve lived too long? I’d rather we both dropped dead–now–this instant!”
*** Kildare has sent his mother a handmaid item which a patient gave him instead of money. Beatrice reads his letter and knows it is over with her and Jimmy but his mother hopes for a match. Dr. Kildare the father has crumpled up a letter from a doctor that examined him saying he must rest because his heart is weak.
Highlight (Yellow) | Page 25
“I’d hate to ask him for time off,” said Kildare slowly. “I know,” nodded Carew. “You’re afraid that he’d blow your head off.” “No, sir. He’d give me as much time as I want–if I ask him seriously.” “Now you amaze me!” “But the fact is that when I’m not here he does the work of two men. He doesn’t sleep. He burns himself up. And he’s not young, you know.”
September 3, 2019
This was a silly, feel-good story. The old TV series was about an hour long - same as this book. It is worth reading this book if you recollect the old TV and radio shows and want to see how and where they began.
July 1, 2012
A very enjoyable read. Takes you back to a time prior to WWII when hospitals were like Mount Olympus and physicians were like the gods. It is hard to imagine a medical intern earning on 67 cents a day, especially when now days you can't even be looked at for less than a hundred dollars or more. Great human interest in the plot with a mild mystery.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews