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Book Review: The Lady Doc
Aug. 30th, 2022 06:08 pmIn Kim Todd’s Sensational: The Hidden History of America’s “Girl Stunt Reporters”,
Todd mention that girl stunt report Caroline Lockhart also wrote novels, including The Lady Doc, a publication from 1912 which daringly involved abortion and lesbians! So of course I had to go read it.
When we first meet our protagonist, Dr. Emma Harpe, she sits with “her elbows on her knees, her feet wide apart, her face buried in her hands… unfeminine even in her tears.” She has just performed an operation (never named, but strongly implied to be an abortion) on her best friend Alice Freoff, who died on the operating table. The medical authorities, who take a dim view of (a) abortions and (b) killing patients, force Dr. Harpe out of town, and she flees to the west, where she fetches up in the up and coming town of Crowheart.
As Crowheart has no physician, Dr. Harpe is welcomed with open arms, and quickly establishes herself as a popular physician. She is respected not only professionally but socially: the working men make her “more or less the target of coarse jokes, as is any woman who leaves the beaten track, yet the general feeling toward her was one of friendliness, and she has “a strong attraction for the women of Crowheart—an attraction that amounted to fascination.”
As with the abortion, the narrative never tells us straight out that Dr. Harpe is a lesbian, but it’s about as blunt as it can get. As Dr. Harpe explains to Mrs. Augusta Symes,“I like women anyhow; men bore me mostly. I had a desperate 'crush' at boarding-school, but she quit me cold when she married. I've taken a great shine to you, Gus.”
Mr. Symes is less than enthusiastic about this new-found intimacy, but he’s also powerless to stop it: Dr. Harpe holds a piece of blackmail over his head (I believe he got Augusta pregnant before he married her, but like so much else, this is never directly stated) which would ruin him in the town. In fact, it’s such a powerful piece of blackmail that Dr. Harpe uses it to force Mr. Symes to appoint her as the company doctor for a new irrigation scheme that he’s promoting.
If Dr. Harpe were a competent doctor this might not be too bad, but unfortunately the botched abortion is characteristic of her skill. She became a doctor not out of any sense of vocation, but because a doctor is “exempt from many of the restrictions and conventionalities which hampered her sex.” In fairly short order, one of the workers from the irrigation projects dies of blood poisoning because Dr. Harpe didn’t properly clean his wounded arm.
Beneath her surface swaggering charm, Dr. Harpe has a vein of petty selfishness. She takes against the belle of Crowheart, Essie Tisdale, partly because Essie spurned her advances, but mostly because Essie has got in good with Ogden Van Lennop, a very rich man for whom (purely as a business venture) Dr. Harpe has set her cap.
In pursuit of this vendetta, Dr. Harpe tears up Van Lennop’s love confession to Essie, spreads rumors about Essie’s rides with Van Lennop that end with Essie’s dismissal from her job as waitress at the hotel, arranges for the elderly sheep rancher Dubois to renew his suit to Essie just when Essie is at her most down and out, and then helps frame Essie for Dubois’s murder! (which conveniently takes place before the marriage could be consummated, so Essie is still a virgin when, of course, she reunites with Van Lennop at the end of the book.) (Years earlier, Dubois had abandoned his Indian wife and their two boys so they nearly starved in the Canadian winter, and the boys showed up to get their revenge at this extremely convenient time.) (Fortunately Essie turns out to have rich relations and the town just decides she’s not guilty and they never liked Dubois anyway and the murder thread mostly gets dropped.)
Unfortunately for Dr. Harpe, this stream of pettiness blows up in her face. When Symes breaks free of Dr. Harpe’s blackmail (because incidentally Van Lennop has ruined his crooked irrigation scheme, so Symes has nothing back to lose; there’s a lot going on in this book), he screams, “You human sponge! You parasite! Do you think I'm blind because I've been dumb? Go! you—DEGENERATE!”
On her way out of town, Dr. Harpe pauses briefly at the Symes’ house to ask Augusta to go with her, only Augusta refuses, and Dr. Harpe chokes her almost to death! And the book ends as it began, with Dr. Harpe flinging herself on a train to begin a new life somewhere else.
What’s interesting is how hard Lockhart has to work for Symes’ cry of “DEGENERATE!” It’s not enough that Dr. Harpe is a masculine woman with a profession who professedly gets crushes on women. Lockhart has to make Dr. Harpe a venal, vengeful person, and an incompetent, money-grubbing doctor, in order to ensure that the readers are on board.
Todd mention that girl stunt report Caroline Lockhart also wrote novels, including The Lady Doc, a publication from 1912 which daringly involved abortion and lesbians! So of course I had to go read it.
When we first meet our protagonist, Dr. Emma Harpe, she sits with “her elbows on her knees, her feet wide apart, her face buried in her hands… unfeminine even in her tears.” She has just performed an operation (never named, but strongly implied to be an abortion) on her best friend Alice Freoff, who died on the operating table. The medical authorities, who take a dim view of (a) abortions and (b) killing patients, force Dr. Harpe out of town, and she flees to the west, where she fetches up in the up and coming town of Crowheart.
As Crowheart has no physician, Dr. Harpe is welcomed with open arms, and quickly establishes herself as a popular physician. She is respected not only professionally but socially: the working men make her “more or less the target of coarse jokes, as is any woman who leaves the beaten track, yet the general feeling toward her was one of friendliness, and she has “a strong attraction for the women of Crowheart—an attraction that amounted to fascination.”
As with the abortion, the narrative never tells us straight out that Dr. Harpe is a lesbian, but it’s about as blunt as it can get. As Dr. Harpe explains to Mrs. Augusta Symes,“I like women anyhow; men bore me mostly. I had a desperate 'crush' at boarding-school, but she quit me cold when she married. I've taken a great shine to you, Gus.”
Mr. Symes is less than enthusiastic about this new-found intimacy, but he’s also powerless to stop it: Dr. Harpe holds a piece of blackmail over his head (I believe he got Augusta pregnant before he married her, but like so much else, this is never directly stated) which would ruin him in the town. In fact, it’s such a powerful piece of blackmail that Dr. Harpe uses it to force Mr. Symes to appoint her as the company doctor for a new irrigation scheme that he’s promoting.
If Dr. Harpe were a competent doctor this might not be too bad, but unfortunately the botched abortion is characteristic of her skill. She became a doctor not out of any sense of vocation, but because a doctor is “exempt from many of the restrictions and conventionalities which hampered her sex.” In fairly short order, one of the workers from the irrigation projects dies of blood poisoning because Dr. Harpe didn’t properly clean his wounded arm.
Beneath her surface swaggering charm, Dr. Harpe has a vein of petty selfishness. She takes against the belle of Crowheart, Essie Tisdale, partly because Essie spurned her advances, but mostly because Essie has got in good with Ogden Van Lennop, a very rich man for whom (purely as a business venture) Dr. Harpe has set her cap.
In pursuit of this vendetta, Dr. Harpe tears up Van Lennop’s love confession to Essie, spreads rumors about Essie’s rides with Van Lennop that end with Essie’s dismissal from her job as waitress at the hotel, arranges for the elderly sheep rancher Dubois to renew his suit to Essie just when Essie is at her most down and out, and then helps frame Essie for Dubois’s murder! (which conveniently takes place before the marriage could be consummated, so Essie is still a virgin when, of course, she reunites with Van Lennop at the end of the book.) (Years earlier, Dubois had abandoned his Indian wife and their two boys so they nearly starved in the Canadian winter, and the boys showed up to get their revenge at this extremely convenient time.) (Fortunately Essie turns out to have rich relations and the town just decides she’s not guilty and they never liked Dubois anyway and the murder thread mostly gets dropped.)
Unfortunately for Dr. Harpe, this stream of pettiness blows up in her face. When Symes breaks free of Dr. Harpe’s blackmail (because incidentally Van Lennop has ruined his crooked irrigation scheme, so Symes has nothing back to lose; there’s a lot going on in this book), he screams, “You human sponge! You parasite! Do you think I'm blind because I've been dumb? Go! you—DEGENERATE!”
On her way out of town, Dr. Harpe pauses briefly at the Symes’ house to ask Augusta to go with her, only Augusta refuses, and Dr. Harpe chokes her almost to death! And the book ends as it began, with Dr. Harpe flinging herself on a train to begin a new life somewhere else.
What’s interesting is how hard Lockhart has to work for Symes’ cry of “DEGENERATE!” It’s not enough that Dr. Harpe is a masculine woman with a profession who professedly gets crushes on women. Lockhart has to make Dr. Harpe a venal, vengeful person, and an incompetent, money-grubbing doctor, in order to ensure that the readers are on board.
