I say all this because this book was the “book club read” for my local library, and popped up on the Overdrive home page one day when I was doing my usual Smaug-like inspection rounds of my various library hold/loan lists. I was (the horror) somewhat out of books when the words “unlimited copies! no hold time!” caught my eye.
And how happy I am that I checked this out and gave it a read! It’s part of an entire series of books I’ve read recently featuring Female Characters Overcoming Odds, but as part of a series there’s a nice balance between realism and revisionist history going on. Nora Beady, our main character, was the sole survivor of a [cholera] outbreak and taken in as a ward of sorts by the eccentric Dr. Horace Croft, who raises her as a surgeon’s assistant/diagrammer who’s really more of a general surgeon. He’s whimsical in the extreme, hardly caring that harboring a female quasi-surgeon is grounds for censure and loss of his license. But then shows up Dr. Daniel Gibson, a dashing young doctor who wants to learn from the unorthodox Dr. Croft and threatens the delicate secretive balance which allows Nora to practice.
Accustomed as I am to modern day medical shows, I was pretty surprised by how often the patients treated by the various doctors just…didn’t make it. It’s hardly surprising–pre-Pasteur, pre-anesthesia, what else do you expect–but the arc of fiction primes you to expect that the good docs are going to ride in and save the day. Even Scrubs has most patients making it, with the failures saved for Very Special Episodes Featuring The Fray.
While there’s some romance along the way–Nora is, after all, a young unattached lady–it all takes a backseat to the medical-y plot and Nora’s quest to be seen as a full and competent surgeon in her own right. To that end, the story ends in a cliffhanger of sorts–in that things are not settled, the scope has widened, and Nora remains in pursuit of her dreams. In that sense the book reminded me a lot of Sherry’s Thomas’ Lady Sherlock series. I immediately put the next book in this series on hold, and I hope that I’ve found another enjoyable historical fiction series to follow along with.