Yet another medical cover today, this one for 1967's The Doctor's Decision by Kerry Mitchell. The art is credited to someone named only Kalin. We think it's safe to conclude that's Victor Kalin, the veteran Dell Publications illustrator behind such classic fronts as Somerset Maugham's Rain and John D. MacDonald's Soft Touch. The author, Kerry Mitchell, was a pseudonym used by several writers, including Lee Pattinson, Ray Slattery, and Richard Wilkes-Hunter, and this tale deals with a plastic surgeon named David Barron who pioneers a radical new surgery, while simultaneously seeing his reputation threatened by scandal. We've run across Mitchell before. Remember Bush Nurse? That's our fave. 

Aussie writer Shane Douglas may win the all time pseudonym prize. He was really Richard Wilkes-Hunter, but besides writing as Douglas, he wrote as Kerry Mitchell, Michael Owen, Leslie Wilkes, Shauna Marlowe, Sheila Garland, R.W. Hunters, James Dark, Tod Conrad, Tod Crane, Ted Conway, Caroline Farr, Diana Douglas, Adrian Gray, Alison Hart, Lucy Waters, and so forth. Under his Douglas pseudonym, he wrote a lot of doctor and nurse novels, so we thought we’d share some of those amusing covers today. Above and below you see five, all from the early 1960s, with art by unknown. 

Bush Nurse, written by medical novel specialist Kerry Mitchell, aka Richard Wilkes-Hunter, Ray Slattery, and Lee Pattinson, has nothing to do with women's bushes, but it’d be cooler if it did. What you actually get is the story of a pretty nurse who takes an assignment in the remote Aussie outback to heal from a broken heart, but finds herself in a love triangle with two doctors who have their own difficult histories. The action eventually centers on rains, floods, and a wave of medical cases that threaten to overwhelm the little clinic. The above paperback appeared in 1962 with uncredited art, and as you can see at right, there was another version, which is actually from two years earlier (and shows how the nurse's horse was replaced by an automobile), also uncredited art-wise.