Jungle Hospital

by Juliet Shore

Nancy Leyland was happy to return to Malaya, her birthplace, to practice tropical medicine. But there were misunderstandings with Miles Malham, the hospital Superintendent, and the situation was not helped by the beautiful Dr. Ilsa Brent nor by accidents to which Nancy seemed prone

192 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1962

Reviews

[StMargarets · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a strange story. At first I thought this was set during the 1950’s in that last-gasp of English colonialism, but Billie Jean King is mentioned when the heroine is taking tennis lessons. First written in 1962 and then a 1976 publication date. Huh.

So I had to adjust my thinking – same with my reader expectations as the story progressed.

Story opens with the hero’s point of view. He’s a surgeon and superintendent of a jungle hospital in Malaysia. He’s thinking about the OW (a blonde bombshell pathologist who keeps coming on to him). He’s not interested in her and he’s trying to figure out what to do. When he needs an additional doctor, he leaps at the chance to employ another woman, thinking that she will keep the OW company and out of mischief.

New lady doctor is the heroine – daughter of two missionaries (now deceased) from that district. The OW goes to work on her right away, letting her think that she and H are having an affair and that the H disapproves of heroine. Heroine had driven her brakeless car into a tree and injured herself, so this is plausible. However, hero doesn’t disapprove of heroine and puts up with her aggressiveness with great patience.

And from there all sorts of misunderstandings and accidents occur. There’s a rubber plantation guy who pursues heroine. The hero rescues the h from a swimming mishap, being caught on an island without a boat, being left on the side of the road by bandits after delivering a baby. . . You get the picture.

The OW overplays her hand with the hero and he finally gets it through her head that he isn’t interested. OW then falsifies a pathology report so the hero feels forced to resign after a girl dies from smallpox. The heroine is angry and goads the OW into admitting it’s her fault so OW resigns.
The H/h then get together.

But there’s a couple more chapters to go. What now?

Heroine is kidnapped because the bandits think she is the OW. OW is the daughter of a prominent European in Malaysia and this will be their quick buck. Heroine endures three days of a jungle walk and several beatings before the hero and the army find her.

The story ends with their wedding in her parents’ missionary church. They are planning to move elsewhere to work and eventually have a family for an HEA.

This was so strange because the hero was such a beta. The heroine was clueless about how evil the OW was and how the H felt about her. Plus there was so much patios and poor English transcribed from natives that it felt uncomfortably like parody. With the H/h leaving with no regrets and without showing any successful cases, there didn’t seem much of a point to the jungle hospital in the first place.

[Margo · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three and a half stars for this nutty little book. It's worth reading, although the H in this book has moments when he is very hard to like, largely because he really is not in touch with his emotions. He's in a medical outpost where there is only one woman, a glamorous doctor who is enjoying being the only gal in town. She's out for scalps and makes a few moves on the H, who is very uncomfortable but is also starting to wear down a bit, much to his chagrin -- on the first occasion she shows up in the middle of the night in a skimpy nightie and hurls herself into his arms, "hugging and pestling and weeping and beseeching until a kind of madness overcame him and he wanted only to take and Comfort and embrace her, without even trying to understand her." Fortunately, he pushes the temptress away and tells her to control her emotions, but then is "shocked by his physical reaction to elemental womanhood."

In a later incident, she surprises him and gives him an eyeful of cleavage as she has unbuttoned her white coat and is wearing a low-cut dress underneath it. He kisses her hard before sanity overtakes him, but they both know that sooner or later her ploys are going to drag him into a sordid physical affair "unworthy of his manhood." When he finds out that there's a possibility another female doctor might come to the outpost, he's delighted because that will somehow deter Doctor OW. He makes sure to rub it in that the new doctor is reputedly quite charming and young.

Why the H thinks this will help in any way isn't really clear, and in fact the OW redoubles her efforts and works hard to sow dissent between the pompous H and the businesslike, somewhat embittered h (she has been deceived by a married man in the past). All the while during these clashes, the H finds himself becoming more and more attracted to the h, but much of this is revealed through glimpses of the H's thought process, such as this case when he meets the h on the beach:

"Actually she would have been gratified to know that the Superintendent of Lan Khumpur hospital considered she had a dainty figure which did all the right things in the right places. He particularly liked her legs, slim and yet shapely. Ilsa would have been horrified to learn that he thought of her legs as two bananas."

The H is, in fact, correct. I suspect that ANY woman would be horrified to learn that a man thought of her legs as two bananas.

So on it goes, with the H's ridiculous thought processes adding SO MUCH.

By the way, if you are wondering what "pestling" is, it means the OW was grinding herself against him. Don't look it up on Urban Dictionary, though, unless you want to learn about something you probably never had needed to know (no judgment, I just believe that kitchen devices belong in the kitchen).