Doctor's Wife

Up the literary beach in recent years have rolled successive tides--a series of psychological novels, sociological books, newspapermen's memoirs, etc. A minor tide which showed no signs of ebbing in 1938 was a wave of books about doctors. Recent best-selling examples: An American Doctor's Odyssey, The Horse and Buggy Doctor, The Citadel. A book called Dr. Norton's Wife, by Dr. Ferdinand Schemm's wife, Mildred Walker, appeared last week just in time to ring the big year out.

Mildred Walker says she began writing at the age of seven. From the time she was 12, she was periodically embarrassed by the village postmaster in Grafton, Vt., where her family spent its summers. Mildred's rejected manuscripts were too bulky to fit the family postbox, and the postmaster handed the packages out to her personally.

As a student at Wells College, where she studied under Robert P. Tristram Coffin, and afterwards as an advertising copy writer in Philadelphia and as a country doctor's wife in upper Michigan, her notable successes were: 1) being sued by a villager whom she described too candidly; 2) winning a single silver spoon in an advertising contest (first prize: a whole chest of silver); 3) winning $14 for a contest article entitled How I Met the Problems of Adolescence in my Daughter, which she wrote shortly before her first child was born. Her first published novel, Fireweed, won the University of Michigan's Avery Hopwood Prize.

As an intelligent wife and reader, Mildred Walker noticed that most novels about doctors were concerned with triumphs in emergencies; that in real life most doctors had plenty of long-drawn-out failures. In this novel, which she rewrote three times, she makes Dr. Norton fail in two pinches which squeeze him as well as his patients--he cannot cure his wife of multiple sclerosis, his sister-in-law of loving him.

To queasy readers it may provide a sensation something like that of sitting in an operating amphitheatre for the first time. Readers with steadier stomachs will follow with interest such clinical details as the sensations of Dr. Norton's wife when she is having an uncontrollable laughing fit, and when she realizes she can never be cured.

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