On my shelf a long time, and finally not

 Yes Sister, No Sister
by Jennifer Craig

Fun and educational tale of a nursing apprentice in the 1950s, as it says on the cover. At first I thought it was going to be superb, because it started off well and had lots of medical stuff mixed in with the fun, fear and tedium of nursing. There are amusing bedpan and urinal stories here, as well as the kind of detail that make you really appreciate the nursing profession. Yes, it seems silly to have to make and remake beds until the corners are mathematically tight and the two nurses working as a pair are like a well-oiled machine. But it's not at all silly to bandage a wound so the strips are neither too tight or too loose and overlap perfectly at the edges.

But the book is never funny enough to laugh outright and never sad enough to make you cry. She described sad things but with the kind of distance in her voice that reminds you of a person writing a letter. In fact, she switched the narration to letters from time to time--I assume she wrote this several years after the fact and found letters a way to give you the "here and now" feeling she was unable to conjure in her writing.