Not only do the patients in the male ward look better lately—if they keep making this kind of progress they’ll soon brawl over the nurse and be pronounced 100% normal. Physically, anyway. Obviously, you have superior cover work here, and that’s because it was painted by Rudolph Belarski, one of the can’t-miss illustrators of the mid-century era. He painted this one for Venus Books and Mitchell Coleman, aka William Neubauer, and the copyright is 1954. We have Belarski scattered throughout the website, particularly in men’s magazines and cover collections, but to see a few interesting individual entries, you can go here, here, here, and here. Also, note that the patient in the foreground is holding a paperback. It’s Sylvia Erskine’s 1954 novel Nurses’ Quarters, for which Belarski also painted the cover. How meta of him. Is that meta? Let’s just call it self-referential.
