I SWEAR BY APOLLO

Another doctor drama with dreadful dissections and nicely sutured love tangles akin in its artless story and medical know -how to the author's The Town and Dr. Moore (1965). Matthew Chapin, willed money for medical studies by rough, skilled Dr. Hurd whom he served as medical orderly during the Civil War, journeys to Dr. Hurd's small home town, Hadden, where he does what he hadden' oughta. While wooing the lovely Cissie Ward, a widow, Matthew sinks into the more willing arms of a village girl who later dies bearing his child. Leaving the two ladies weeping and shricking together, Matthew flees to medical school where he meets crippled Ed, who becomes a lifelong friend, in spite of Ed's unwitting killing of a school bully. The friends meet again at Harvard Medical School; and--of all people Cissie Ward has taken up residence in Boston! Cissie, who had taken in Matthew's child, cannot see her way clear to marry Matthew, and marries Ed. Matthew also embarks on a loveless marriage with a little nurse, Hettie, who has been hot on the chase. Conveniently both unloved ones are dispatched by scarlet fever and c-n-er respectively, and Matthew and Cissie are free to tiptoe through the test tubes. Operations aplenty, some historical detail on experimental medicine, and the schlock treatment.