Love from a Surgeon

by Elizabeth Gilzean

It's over a hundred years since the first woman doctor qualified, but there are some men -- intelligent men, too -- who still haven't got used to the idea. Bill Carmichael was one of them, as Noel Aston found to her dismay when she was appointed to work under him on the surgical side of a big hospital. Could the barrier between them ever be broken? This story provides the answer.

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1959

About the author

As an author for Harlequin Romance, Elizabeth Gilzean published thirteen novels. Her work was primarily focused on the very popular Doctor/Nurse romances, a result of her professional work as a nurse. She wrote primarily in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Born in 1913, she also wrote under the pseudonyms Elizabeth Houghton and Mary Hunton. Her real name may have been Houghton Blanchet, though some sources cite Gilzean as her real name.

Reviews

[Bryn · Rating 1 out of 5]

This one was frustrating -- Gilzean's heroine (oops I didn't write down her name) is full of feminist outrage about how hard it is to be a female surgeon in the 1950s, and YES, it is! It definitely is! But reading someone being angry and miserable all the time isn't very enjoyable, and Gilzean herself clearly thinks her protagonist needs to just calm down, which is horribly unsatisfying.

The book features one of my least favourite vintage Harlequin plot points -- the male professional saying 'Woman, you need to quit working in my vicinity, because you are Too Attractive and I will be so distracted by your presence that my work will suffer.' The idea that women need to sacrifice their careers because men can't function around them is so gross, and Gilzean takes it far too serously as a problem that her protagonist needs to take into account -- the protagonist's outrage at this is part of *her* problem, that she won't just accept that despite being a surgeon she is A Woman and she must embrace her feminine needs and traits and live with the fact that men will find her distracting and it's unreasonable of her to expect them to treat her as a peer... unless, of course, she's married, in which case it's all fine, she'll work with her husband! And the worst thing about it is that Gilzean is clearly TRYING to be feminist here, she's writing about 'how do you be A Woman and still have a career', but it doesn't work in the modern day because the entire idea that being A Woman is a single monolithic thing is so clearly false.

On top of all of that, this one seems to have gotten pretty badly edited when it was cut down from its original Mills & Boon publication -- the ending in particular feels horribly written, there are huge time/space jumps between paragraphs and it doesn't make a lot of sense. I doubt I'll ever come across the original but if I do, I'm curious to see if I'm right about the bad editing -- for all my complaints about her ideology, Gilzean seems far too competent a writer for that to have been her original last chapter!