Before NURSES...There Was THE NURSES!

A new medical drama called Nurses premieres on NBC this Monday...

...focusing on (what else?) nurses in a big-city hospital.

But it's not the first prime-time show to emphasize "Angels of Mercy" over the MDs!

Back in the early 1960s, during the "hospital series" fad that swept TV, there was...The Nurses (Note the "The" in the title) on CBS!

To quote the official series synopsis:

Alden General Hospital's relentless war against Death sees the nurses fight shoulder to shoulder beside the surgeons and doctors.

Their operating gowns get as blood stained, their backs ache as cruelly from the grueling hours, their watch over the patients is as continued and concerned.

But there is a difference between the men and women at Alden General!

For within the heart of each woman another war must be waged--the battle between her devotion to her highly-professional career and her woman's need for a man's sheltering love!

This is the story of two of Alden General's finest---one a wide-eyed young student nurse at the start of her career, the other a head nurse, an attractive but lonely widow in her thirties.

How each fought her own war is the story of...The Nurses!

The series was popular enough to generate a number of now hard-to-find collectibles, including a board game, paperback novel series, and a three-issue comic book, from which we'll present a story next week!

Note: the series was retitled The Doctors and the Nurses in its' third (and final) prime-time season before becoming a daily daytime soap opera with the same characters, but totally-recast!

That version...restoring the original title of The Nurses, ran another three years!
Amazing what you can learn on this blog, eh?