District Nurse

By Faith Baldwin

“‘It’s Ellen Adams,’ she called; and then, the sesame that had opened so many closed doors ‘…the visiting nurse.’”

It’s the Depression, and Visiting Nurse Ellen Adams, working in a poor city neighborhood, is brutally aware of the gritty reality of the lives of the people she struggles so valiantly to improve, going toe to toe with drugs, violence, and desperate poverty, all while supporting her invalid mother and younger sister at home. She’s sworn she will never have time for love, but fate intervenes when, while chatting with the neighborhood truant, eight-year-old Bill, his puppy escapes into the street and is almost run over by Frank Bartlett. The young man is instantly smitten with Ellen and demonstrates his honor by stepping up for young Bill—and soon is stepping out with Ellen on his arm. But when Ellen, in the course of her daily rounds, comes across a young unmarried woman who swears the father of her new baby is Frank Bartlett, her disillusionment is devastating and possibly even too much for her tender, overburdened heart to bear.

“Here is a lovely story, and Mrs. Baldwin tells it with her usual charm and sympathetic understanding of the lives and problems of the people who make up the backbone of the nation, the working people.” The Tampa Bay Times, May 1932

“District Nurse is an absorbing tale. Her characters, all real and vigorously alive, are but the underpinnings of a picture of human frailty, back-biting, cheating, misunderstanding, despair, hope, ecstasy, all our emotions.” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 1932