Nurses

“They constructed their role as that of educated, supportive allies of physicians at the bedsides of sick patients. But they also saw their role as occurring in spaces where they would be the only women with the uncontested authority to engage with medical content. Nurses welcome the military analogies because they referred not only to the male medical head but also to their own legitimate power to search for relevant pieces of medical data, to negotiate new meanings about a particular patient’s symptoms, and to create new ideas about the significance of a particular clinical situation. Nursing leaders, that is, did not simply work with accepted social configurations. Rather, they deliberately manipulated carefully constructed representations to meet their own ends (D’Antonio, 50) . . . [by the early 1920s], nurses had already assumed the knowledge and the expertise needed for vigilant clinical observation and intervention: for recognizing, understanding, and responding to the meaning of discrete physiological and psychological signs and symptoms . . . They claimed, in fact, the very knowledge about practice and process that, as historian John Harley Warner has argued, was precisely what physicians – before the dawn of scientific medicine – took as their exclusive domain (52).