Her exploration includes incidents which reveal both cooperation and contestation with doctors and their medical goals and priorities.
Wicks constructs a complex and nuanced picture of nurse-doctor relations.
She uncovers the tension between structure and agency in nursing work, and explores the ways in which nurses demonstrate their capacity as knowledgeable actors within the constraints of gendered, institutional structures. She also shows how nurses' discourses of healing, dating from pre-Nightingale days, have survived into the present, even when they are in opposition to conventional medical practice.