Gilbert Darling

Title: Surgical Call
Author: Margaret E. Sangster
Publisher: Triangle Books
Copyright: 1942
Illustrator: Gilbert Darling
Review available

The signature in the lower left-hand corner is similar to other known Gilbert Darling works, such as Slug It Slay! and others posted at the site 100 Years of Illustration and Design by Paul Giambarda.

Charity Standish was a doctor—but she was also a woman, and a very attractive one. She could perform a difficult operation with skill and battle death with the finesse that she displayed at the bridge table, but she sometimes found it difficult to dissect human emotions, and soul surgery wasn’t always easy! On the same evening Charity met Gregory Wheelock, stock broker, and Dr. Hugh Evans, who was her Chief-of-Staff at the Cathcart Memorial Hospital. Both men fell in love with Charity, and she, oddly enough, cared for both of them. Gregory was a good pal, a playmate for her leisure hours. Hugh was a man whose work she could admire; and his strange silences and awkward attempts at love-making stirred her deeply. Moreover, he understood her ambitious and was proud of her skill, whereas Gregory believed that doctoring was a man’s profession and that a woman’s place was in the home. The balance was swinging in favor of Hugh when unexpected and dramatic things began to happen. Surgical Call? To doctors on a hospital staff that term applied to emergency duties. To Charity, Surgical Call meant much more. It meant the pull between a profession and love.