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.
1938—BBC Airs First Sci-Fi Program
BBC Television produces the first ever science fiction television program, an adaptation of a section of Czech writer Karel Capek’s dark play R.U.R., aka, Rossum’s Universal Robots. The robots in the play are not robots in the modern sense of machines, but rather are biological entities that can be mistaken for humans. Nevertheless, R.U.R. featured the first known usage of the term “robot”.