Miss Susie Slagle’s by Augusta Tucker, originally published in 1939, is an interesting look at the life of medical students at Johns Hopkins Hospital in 1912, the glory days of the founding of modern medical education in the United States.
Miss Slagle runs a boarding house for medical students and has supported numerous young doctors-to-be through the process with her good nature and unconditional caring. The book opens with introductions to her current boarders, all with different backgrounds and very different personalities, motivations, weaknesses, and ambitions. It takes us through four years, highlighting their training and interpersonal relationships.
Descriptions of Baltimore and of the hospital at that time are lush and detailed. The rigorous training is aptly portrayed. It’s a lovely period piece. However, it’s dated in style. The male-female relationships all progress from love at first sight and none seem realistic. Women are presented in a condescending way, even when the author intends admiration. Racist views permeate the book in a way that is rather nauseating to a modern reader. Although widely read in its day and even made into a movie, the book is now more valuable as a window into the past than as entertaining fiction.
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