Norm Eastman

Title: To Please the Doctor
Author: Marjorie Moore
Published: 1974, ©1950
Publisher: Harlequin
Illustrator: Norm Eastman

His signature is in the upper left-hand corner of the illustration.

Dr. Duncan McRey was a most difficult person, thought Jill Fernley, and almost as bad was Brenda Malling, her staff nurse. Jill loved her work in St. Joseph’s Hospital, but hated the intrigues and friction of community life. Brenda was jealous of Jill’s success, but why, oh! why had Dr. McRey to be so unfriendly to nurses when he was so gentle with children? Was he like that to all women? This was a question which came to concern Jill more and more before at last she found the answer.

Edrien King

Title: Nurse Julie and the Knight
Author: Jeanne Judson
Published: ©1965
Publisher: Avalon
Illustrator: Edrien King

She is credited on the inside cover flap, and her signature is to the left of the nurse’s right elbow.

Women’s Hospital had been founded by women and was staffed by women, and Julie Sheridan, who had wanted to be a doctor but was forced to give up the dream because she must educate her younger sister, found it infinitely satisfying to work there. Everyone in the hospital was talking about the beautiful and wealthy Alice Danver, who had just lost her baby. Mrs. Roger Danver had a grown son, and this baby had been looked forward to with joy by Alice and her second husband. Mrs. Danver was a VIP—not only was she a member of the board, but she was a granddaughter of one of the founders—and most of the nurses would have been delighted to be selected as the nurse to accompany Alice Danver home. Not so Julie, who was bent on learning all that she could about her chosen profession. The Danvers lived in a luxurious town house on New York’s fashionable East Side, but Julie soon found that the household was presided over by an evil genius in the person of the housekeeper, Hetty Brown, who dominated everyone there, including Alice and Roger Danver. Life in the Danver home would have been unbearable for Julie had it not been for Leo Cross, Alice’s son by a previous marriage. Leo Cross didn’t really look like a knight in shining armor, but in Julie’s eyes he was even more than that. Only Leo dared to stand up to the formidable Hetty. It was Leo who precipitated the storm that finally freed the Danvers of Hetty’s morbid dominance, and it was Leo who helped with Julie’s frivolous young sister presented a problem too big for Julie to handle alone. 

Bern Smith

Title: Doctor Jonathan
Author: Jane Alan
Published: 1976, ©1955
Publisher: Harlequin
Illustrator: Bern Smith

His signature runs up her right sleeve.

After the death of her father, Vicky Meredith went to London to take up a stage career, but this ambition was soon ended by a severe throat infection. On her return home, Vicky found her very good friend Paul engaged to her sister Jennifer, and bitterly hurt, she took a job with Doctor Jonathan Crofts. This turned out to be a wise decision for her future happiness, but it was some time before this became apparent to Vicky.

Jack Harman

Title: Peter Raynal, Surgeon
Author: Marjorie Moore
Published: 1974
Publisher: Harlequin
Illustrator: Jack Harman

His signature is in the lower left-hand corner. 

This is the story of Kay Somers, nurse, and Peter Raynal, a popular and brilliant surgeon. The strongly opposed forces of their respective characters bring them into a constant conflict which comes to a head when Kay is confronted with the loss of her position at St. Jude’s Hospital, and the breaking of her engagement to the ambitious young farmer who has been a life-long family friend. The story is set against the background of Hospital life and Kay’s own rural home, and brings into relief the diverse qualities of her nature. Her gradual change of heart is brought about through her affection for an ailing child, a reciprocated affection which pierces Kay’s natural armour of reserve. It is the child Christine’s influence on Kay which forges the first link of understanding between herself and Peter Raynal, an understanding which is destined to change the whole course of Kay’s life and bring her the joy and happiness which she had once believe lost to her for all time.

Bill Johnson

Photo courtesy Marianne Johnson

Cover artist William Gray “Bill” Johnson was born in 1931 in Texas. His mother Retha was a remarkable woman who in 1929, at the age of 23, was the first woman pilot in the state of Texas, passing the exam after less than nine hours of instruction and the only person in her class to achieve a perfect score. She was working as a fourth-grade teacher at the time. She married Bill’s father, William Gray Johnson Sr., a year later; he was an aviation instructor, and it’s likely that they met when she was learning to fly. Tragically, however, he drowned shortly after their first anniversary, five months before Bill was born. 

Bill attended Texas Christian University but left before graduating to serve in the air Force during the Korean War, where he played tenor sax in the Air Force Band at Clark Base in the Philippines. After the war he enrolled at the Academy of Advertising Art in San Francisco. There he met his future wife, Nancy, and the pair were married in the city’s famous Grace Church in 1955, and their first child was born there. The couple moved to New York, where Bill worked as an illustrator for paperback novels; his wife was frequently his model. 

After their second child was born, they relocated back to San Francisco and then finally in about 1965 to the Seattle area, where they remained. At that point, Bill was working primarily as a television art director for advertising agencies like McCann Erickson and Ayer Baker. Nancy was a painter and became a teacher at the New School of Visual Concepts in Seattle. Though he was never a pilot himself, he was a plane spotter as a child during World War II, and an aviation photographer and later was described as “a sax-playing-designer-illustrator-aviation photographer … a Texas boy always ready to tell it like it was.” He died July 7, 2009, at age 77; his obituary called him “a legend in the fields of illustration and advertising art direction, and it will be a time well in the future that his achievements are ever equaled.”

Courtesy Marianne Johnson

Paul Anna Soik

Title: Theatre Nurse
Author: Hilda Pressley Nickson
Published: 1965, ©1960
Publisher: Harlequin
Illustrator: Paul Anna Soik

His signature is in the lower left-hand corner.

Catharine Manton was beautiful and efficient, and “her” operating theatre was perfectly run. Why, then, did the new R.S.O. declare that he couldn’t possibly work with her, even if it meant that he—not she—would have to leave the hospital?

Robert Maguire

Title: Prison Nurse
Author: William Neubauer
Published: ©1962
Publisher: Avon Books
Illustrator: Robert Maguire

His signature is in the lower right-hand corner. 

Young Nurse Vivian’s heart went out to the inmates at Clairmount County Correctional Facility. She knew that a good nurse had to be unemotional, but she also knew that behind those forbidding walls young girls were being treated like animals! In the hospital recuperating from a near fatal clubbing she had received at the hands of some would-be-escapees, Vivian found herself the center of city-wide attention. Newspaper editorials lauded her heroism; the Mayor himself came to her bedside to bestow civic awards. But when Vivian argued that the Facility ought to rehabilitate its inmates instead of brutalizing them, the young nurse made a powerful enemy of the Mayor whose plans called for closing the Facility and shipping the girls off to adult prisons. It would take every bit of Vivian’s courage and determination and the dedicated help of her fiancé—a young lawyer who represented a group in opposition to the Mayor’s program—to save, and help the inmates who knew Vivian Hartwell as their Prison Nurse.