KINCAID

Crusader Nurse plays Lady Bountiful to the Appalachian poor in this latest Day-Glo medical minimus by book-a-year-man Denker. Kate Kincaid, newly burned by a battle to unseat a malpracticing doctor, leaves a Midwestern university hospital and travels to West Virginia. There she'll study and train for one year at Appalachian Mountain Hospital under the iron rule of heart-of-gold director Abbott, qualifying as a Family Nurse Practitioner and Midwife. Together with two peers, one a nun, Kate does her boot training, studying, and clinic working with the help of resident doc Ray Boyd—who just might, one thinks at this point, elbow out Kate's everloving lawyer-lover Howard Brewster. Meanwhile, Kate also learns how to handle the natives, a poor but proud lot, and "talk folks." Among the hill people: landlady Aunt Elvira Russell, a former nurse; an ancient, tobacco-chewing diabetic who ain't allowing she knows where her sugar's coming from; a rattlesnake-twirling preacher who gets bit; an elderly retired professor of regional anthropology; and child Eloise, only bright chick of a decent, hard-scrabble couple, who writes poetry. (Kate wins her battle to have Eloise educated at IQ level.) Then, after a stretch on the lonesome-trail-and-cabin route, Kate studies midwifery under Dr. Boyd: "for the next six months, you'll be concerned with only one thing. Life!" Predictably there are a number of birthings—one a cabin delivery of extreme difficulty. But Kate will next volunteer to take over an outpost clinic—where bits of diagnosing, jollying, treating, and virtuouso sleuthing ensue. (One man's infertility problem is caused by too-snug jockey shorts.) And finally there's a huge flood from a strip-mining mud slide. . . and guess who comes through as heroine to the whir of TV cameras? With pseudo-Foxfire natives and case after hurting, heaving case: Super Nurse wins all hearts—in a pop formula old as them that hills.