A Lamp is Heavy by Sheila MacKay Russell ~ 1950. This edition: J.B. Lippincott, 1950. Hardcover. 256 pages.
My rating: 5/10.
This one just sneaks (on quiet rubber soles, perhaps?) into the “keeper” pile. It did have its moments, though it was mostly just a milder North American version of the stellar Monica Dickens life-as-a-British-nursing-student classic, One Pair of Feet.
Here’s a bit of trivia I discovered while trolling about for a bit of background info on author Sheila MacKay Russell. According to writer Julia Hallam in Nursing the Image: Media, Culture and Professional Identity, a critical examination of nursing as portrayed in popular culture, A Lamp is Heavy was adapted into a movie titled The Feminine Touch in 1956, with the setting changed to England from North America – I originally had said “The United States” here, but it turns out that the author is from Alberta and likely based it on her experiences nursing in Edmonton – and – much to my surprise! – with Monica Dickens herself contributing as a screenwriter.
I can see how A Lamp is Heavy would transfer well to film; it is equally as concerned with a romance between the main character, nursing student Sue Bates, and a handsome young intern, Doctor Alcott, as it is with the events of hospital life.
But I’m getting a bit ahead of myself here. I’ll let the author speak for herself. Though the main character in the novel is named pseudonymously “Sue Bates”, she is based strongly on the author’s own experiences; the book is strongly autobiographical, though details have been changed to obscure the people and places it is based upon.
It was my long-standing and persistent longing to be a nurse … [and this] impelled me to take the most portentous step in my life, in spite of the discouragement heaped upon me by all and sundry of my friends, including my mother. Mother, in her own way, was a realist. Nurses in her mind were synonymous with fallen arches, varicose veins, questionable language and backaches, and only the fact that she discovered, quite by accident, that Florence Nightingale was a lady of cultured family tended to reconcile her to what seemed to her to be my unnecessarily earthy inclinations.. She wasn’t really reconciled until the day came when she could comfort herself with the possibility of my salvaging a doctor husband out of the fiasco. She even kept all of my relatives in a similar state of doubt. This included my father. Where I was concerned, he reflected Mother’s attitudes as faithfully as a full-length mirror, and as I was an only child, he insisted on having a serious talk with the Mayor of the town before I was allowed to set foot on hospital soil. What he expected to get, or what he did get, from the Mayor, I don’t know, but he seemed happier. He came home and said that the board members of the city hospital were all Chamber of Commerce men, and perhaps I would be safe enough if I trained there.
Sue enters the hospital with her class of eleven other eager probationers; the twelve manage to stay the course and finish out their three years of training to graduate together; tales of their goings-on, trials and tribulations make up the majority of this memoir, with time out here and there for more serious discussions of some of the tragedies – and, to be fair, some of the more than occasional joys – of dealing with patients and their woes, as well as sidelights on the plight of the poverty-stricken members of the population who could not afford to avail themselves of proper medical care despite the efforts of a developing medical outreach service led by several of the hospital’s doctors.
Handsome, charismatic and manipulative Doctor Alcott provides romantic interest; he and Sue have an on-again, off-again love affair throughout Sue’s hospital years, which seems to end quite satisfactorily for all concerned. (Including, incidentally, Sue’s mother!)
A decently readable word portrait of a North American hospital in the just-prior-to World War II years, with likeable characters and enough drama to keep one interested start to finish.
I don’t recommend that you rush out and search this one down, though. Instead, invest your hard-earned dollars in Miss Dickens’ grand tale, unless A Lamp is Heavy absolutely leaps off a used bookstore shelf at you – in that case, it would repay a small investment, returning a few hours of interesting reading.
*****
After I published this review, I received a comment from Susan (see comments, below) to the effect that she thought the author was Canadian. I searched around a bit more and came across this mention on pages 9-10 of Volume 2 of Literary History of Alberta: From the End of the War to the End of the Century, by George Melnyk, 1999, University of Alberta Press.
Sheila Mackay Russell (1920-?) published two novels, A Lamp is Heavy (1950) and The Living Earth (1954). Russell was born in Airdrie, Alberta, went to school in Calgary, and attended university in Edmonton, where she took a degree in public health nursing. After her marriage to a doctor in 1947, she continued to live in Edmonton. A Lamp is Heavy is a first-person account of a nurse during the Second World War. [L&P note: A sharp-eyed reader has mentioned that this is slightly inaccurate, as the novel takes place prior to the start of the war.] This popular novel sold 75,000 copies over five years, including a Dutch translation, and was made into a film called The Feminine Touch with wartime Britain as the setting.
Russell’s character captured an exposed feminine sensibility:
“Witnessing childbirth had a strange effect on me. I can’t explain the close, proud kinship with other women which it seemed to bring me. I only knew, as I watched them, that they were performing a tremendous and elemental act of living.”
Russell’s second novel, The Living Earth,also had a nurse for a protagonist. Set in an isolated settlement in the north of the province (Alberta), the novel tells the story of two women who come from the south to seek new lives. “It was spring in Mud Creek. Sun and earth, uniting, had thrown off the shackles of winter; the earth steamed from its effort and the sun lingered triumphantly a few minutes longer each day …”
The Living Earth won the Toronto Womens’ Canadian Club prize. The commercial success of Russell’s first novel reflected a need among women readers for literary work that captured their experiences and sensibilities during World War Two. Her second novel dealt with a more specialized topic and a return to an agrarian setting, which did not have the wider appeal of the first book.
Leaves & Pages 
We dropped by! Thank you for having us 🙂 May we drop a postcard for your site?
http://flatlinerbooks.wordpress.com/2013/01/29/i-wanna-go/
Sure! I checked your site out, too. Vampires love chocolate – who knew?! 😉
I wanted to be a nurse myself when I was young – like my mother – and I read every story like this I could get my hands on. Sue Barton was & is my favorite. But I never came across this book – or Monica Dickens, for that matter.
Oh – Monica Dickens! You *are* in for a treat if you’re new to her. “One Pair of Feet” – her second autobiographical book and such a bestseller that it is generally very easy to come by. I’m re-reading it right now, for the umpteenth time – I’ll try to get a review up asap so you can see what I’m talking about.
The more I read book blogs the more I find myself thinking… Hmm, I’m sure I had a copy of that book. Well, I must have ditched a lot more books than I can recall. You’d never know it, looking at my shelves and the cartons in my basement.
Anyway, even if I only imagined owning it at some time, I know I read it and loved it when I was a teenager.
Wasn’t SMR Canadian? I believe she used to write fiction for Chatelaine way way back when they had one or two stories in each issue and I’d read my mother’s copies. Can find virtually nothing about her on the internet.
Susan – jackpot! I dug a little deeper online & found a brief discussion of SMR, which I am now going to add to the review, and yes, she is definitely Canadian. Born in Airdrie, Alberta, in 1920. Great memory, you have! The whole time I was reading I was thinking this was American – there is no mention of place, it’s all very generic, but the talk of Chambers of Commerce and “joining the war” led to my assumption of an American setting. SMR studied in Calgary and took her nursing degree in Edmonton, so there we go!
Huh! It reminds me of these wondrous books I read as a little girl about a nurse also called Sue, but in this case it was Sue Barton. She was Sue Barton, Student Nurse, and then she had various nurse positions in all the various books. It was great. Except the handsome intern she was in love with as a student was, in my opinion, an autocratic jerk she shouldn’t have married.
Funny, I never read any of the Sue Barton books, though I seem to remember them being around. Wasn’t there a Cherry Ames, too, or was she something else? “Nurse” springs to mind, though. (I guess a moment on Google would answer that, lol! … And yes – there she is! Mystery novels with hospital settings featuring Nurse Cherry Ames.) I never, ever wanted to be a nurse, so these went right past me without the least temptation. 😉
Oh, I’m quite impressed you found more about her. All I found were a few hits where her name was included in a Table of Contents listing from magazine offerings.
Possibly the book was aimed at a US readership. Some things never change.
I’m a nurse, (although I’ve quit patient care) and I often find myself rolling my eyes, or angrily shouting at the television over the way that nurses are portrayed in the media. I think I would like this book. I especially like the character’s mother’s assessment of nursing, with the varicose veins and questionable language–spot on!
Susan – she *was* hard to get info on! The snippet I found was a very lucky “stumble-upon”. I am going to order her 2nd novel, though – there are lots on ABE – it does sound like it might be something I’d enjoy – nursing in northern Alberta.
Patience – omigosh – I just clicked over and read your blog. Wow! Nice-nice-NICE! I want to go to Portugal…
Okay, back to the books 🙂 – I think you would enjoy A Lamp is Heavy, but I’m sure you’d *love* One Pair of Feet by Monica Dickens. And another book I always mentally class in with these is Betty MacDonald’s The Plague and I, the autobiographical account of the author’s time spent in a TB sanitorium in Washington State, back in the 1940s. She’s a patient, but her observations on San life and the nurses & patients are gloriously funny. (Must re-read & review this one too – to make a “vintage hospital books” triptych of sorts!)
Very cool retro cover. Review deserves a thumbs up for surfacing that.
Isn’t this great? I never used to care much if books had dust jackets, but now it’s something I look for, because the art & design is often so fabulous. Or kitschy! Kind of like LP album covers – another art form we don’t get to enjoy anymore since the rise of the compact disc.
Googled Sheila MacKay Russell and, happily, up came this site. Received A Lamp is Heavy for a gift when I started nursing school in Edmonton in 1962. I’ve read it several times over the years and even quoted it in my valedictory address at graduation in 1965. Zoom ahead 50 years – came across it and re-read it. After several years of writing and editing, I see weaknesses, but still found it a page turner. They speak about the war coming up so not a war- time story as mentioned previously. Interesting she chose that time period because born in 1920, she wouldn’t have been in nursing prior to the war. I always thought SMR graduated from the Calgary General so great to get more accurate info. My mother born in 1913, told many similar stories. And amazing that all those years later, I recognize so much from my own experience. The senior students came singing through residence singing “we finally got our 40-hour week” just after I started. So two days off a week for me. I forgot about Sue Barton and Cherry Ames. And Monica Dickens, totally missed her. Lot of fun reading lies ahead.
Hello Wynne, so pleased you found the site and commented on the post. Yes, far from a “perfect” book, but very readable. I imagine much more so if you have personal experience in the field, as it were! I have added a little note to the effect that the review I quoted is inaccurate as to timeframe. Note also that the movie based (loosely, one would presume!) on the book concerns a nurse in wartime Britain. It’s been a while since I read it, but my memory of A Lamp is Heavy is that it is a novel concerned with “domestic” rather than “wartime” nursing, but I guess the wartime setting allows for all sorts of story development. 😉
I did go ahead and track down Russell’s second novel, The Living Earth, and I found it definitely interesting and very well-written, but it was harder going than A Lamp is Heavy, and I can understand its lack of an enthusiastic audience. It has some bleak themes. Basically, a nurse and a teacher meet each other on the train on their way to their postings in a remote northern Alberta settlement. They share a house, and each goes about her business, which, in both cases, is frequently emotionally traumatic. The novel has explicit (for the era of writing) scenes of adultery, spousal & child abuse, alcoholism, racial discrimination and the like. People behave badly, in non-idealized ways. In other words, not a feel-good read! The author, I think, was trying for – and succeeded! – hyper-realism versus rose-coloured glasses. I probably should review it, but I’ve been putting it off, as I think I should really re-read it to do it proper justice, but it *was* a bit of a slog to get through the first time.
Just read another brief nursing memoir, this one set in the 1950s, in rural England. Nurse is a Neighbour, by Joanna Jones. I gave it a short review a week or two ago, grouped in with some other books. I’ll see if this links it:
Three Short Memoirs: Eileen and Her Sister Ruth, Neighbourly Nurse Joanna, and the Real Christopher Robin
Well, the link didn’t quite work out, but I see the posting is recent enough to still be on the sidebar, if you want to check it out. 🙂
Thanks for new info. Was looking also to see if she was still alive. Lots of people are at 93 these days! I’d like to see a bio. I eats away at me that Interesting that the book doesn’t have any info on SMR on the cover or jacket or inside the book. Maybe people liked to be more anonymous in those days. I think pen names were used more often. It does say that the illustrations were from an earlier book. I didn’t think they added much to the book, but we are so much more sophisticated now – especially technology-wise – we didn’t have any! Lastly, I re-read the ending where there is the first mention of the war. It doesn’t actually say it was just starting, just that they were starting to call on hospital personnel. It’s hard to imagine a book written during the war about a hospital, that wouldn’t at least mention it.
Didn’t finish the sentence about “eating away at me” – Just that I find it hard to believe that SMR didn’t graduate from the Calgary General after believing all these years that she did. She could have taken her diploma nursing course there and then her public health in Edmonton which would be the only place at that time for a degree in Alberta. Will let you know if I find more. What a great find this site is.
Thank you so much for your comments. SMR is rather hard to find information on; I searched around a bit more the other morning after reading your comments, to see if I could find mention of her nursing or student records in either Calgary or Edmonton, and I came up with nothing. I’m thinking that perhaps the appropriate nurse’s association might be useful, if one could find out where records are kept? (Probably on a dusty shelf somewhere!) But so far the internet has been remarkably unhelpful! 🙂
I guess it’s time to put it on the back burner since it isn’t life-saving information, but it is interesting. I’m hunting for. It’s interesting that her info seems so hard to find. We don’t know if she’s still living. I think I will look in newspaper obituaries just for fun. It’s always interesting to note what’s “fun” at my age. As far as records go, I believe the individual school would hold them, but not sure. The Calgary General was blown up several years ago. I’m not sure where this blog comes from, but it was a deliberate planned event to demolish the old hospital. I wonder if they took records out first?! Anyway, when I have a little down time I might pursue it further. Thanks so much for looking. I’ll report if I learn anything further.
I am up to chapter 10, where Susan is working in the psychos’ ward, and wondering how she fits in there after her experiences of dating know-all grandaddy Jim the doctor.
Any doubts I may have had about Susan up to that point have been seriously damaged and her shine is quite spectacular. Without perhaps knowing what and how she does it, she has shown herself to be first rate at responding uncompromisingly to patriarchal attitudes, even if camouflaged with professional brilliance and impressive eloquence.
There is nothing fake about this story so far and despite some loopiness I thought I detected here and there and that perhaps was or was not intended to be amusing, I would give the author and her work 8/10.
[…] interested in this book due to my prior discovery of the author’s semi-autobiographical novel A Lamp is Heavy, concerning a young nurse’s experiences as probationer in a North American city teaching […]
Hi just googled and found the following info:
Mrs. Russell was born in Airdrie, Alta.. and grew up in Calgary, graduating with a nursing degree from the Calgary General Hospital in 1942. For a year she worked as a general duty nurse, then enroled at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in the public health nursing course. A year of district nursing in rural Alberta followed and in 1945 she was assigned a dual post as assistant director of public health nursing and assistant director of health edu cation for the p r o v in c la 1 health department. ‘ , While working with the health department, Mrs. Russell used her evenings to write a book about the experiences of student nurses. She says she had always wanted to write and was inspired by a small book of cartoons on the. trials of nurses in-training: Later, those same cartoons were used to illustrate her first book. BOOK WAS SUCCESS . ‘ The book, A Lamp Is Heavy, was published In 1950 and has been a successful seller since. A tongue-in-cheek look at both the fun and hardships of a student nurse’s life, it has been translated into seven languages and made into a ‘film by the J. Arthur Rank organization in 1954. Mrs. Russell says it has had several editions, but she has lost count and doesn’t know what, the total circulation would be now. , “It sells steadily about the same number of copies each year, although it must be getting a tittle out of date now,” she said. “At least, I hope it Is out of date as far as the hardships go.”. Mrs. Russell said that one Of the points she tried to bring out in that book was that the old, apprenticeships, system in which the student paid for her tuition in service to the hospital was bad. “It degenerated into appall- — ing-exploitation-of -the -stu- dent.” The Ottawa Journal 1969-12-11
Just finished the book, loaned by a friend who survived the same three year apprenticeship system as I did in Lincoln, NE. It was a Nightingale school, & I’m proud to say I was trained in that tradition. We had 12 hr. days, but they were broken up with classes from 11AM to 3PM, when we went back to the hospital. NO 12 hr. nights! However, in the last 30 years, nurses have actually ASKED for 12 hr. shifts. I hated them!! Poor continuity, horribly tired staff, and poorer patient care. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. And, growing up, I read all the Cherry Ames books; still have them! Nurse Nancy
I have just received a book called “Our Lamps were Heavy” about student nurse in the 1950’s at Holy Family hospital in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, taught by the “austere sisters ” I.e. Nuns.
Penny at Sparkle Books.
Sheila McKay Russel, her husband George (not a doctor) and their adopted daughter Cathy, born in 1954, lived next door to us in Strathearn, a district in Edmonton. Sadly I lost touch with them, but seems to be Cathy moved to B.C. possibly Victoria. Growing up, Cathy was the same age as my younger sister and we spent many hours in their home and yard. I have fond memories of those years. “Auntie Sheila” was very kind to us.