Nancy wants to play nurse. Her older brothers want to play their own big-boy games and will not be recruited. Then Billy falls over and hurts himself, and suddenly there is a patient, and Nurse Nancy is extremely ready.

Kathryn Jackson wrote hundreds of stories for Golden Books, including Tawny Scrawny Lion, and this one has survived since the 1950s on the strength of a very simple idea: the smallest person in the house turns out to be the one who knows what to do. Corinne Malvern painted it. She was an art editor at Ladies' Home Journal who painted its covers, and her children have real weight and real faces in a way most mid-century picture-book art does not.

Twenty-four pages in the standard Little Golden Book hardcover with the gold foil spine. The people who remember this one from their own childhood tend to buy it on sight, and it holds up for a new three year old just as well.