WALKING THE TIGHTROPE: THE STORY OF NURSING AS TOLD BY NINETEENTH-CENTURY NURSING JOURNALS.
Contributors: University of Iowa.
Published: 1987
Number of pages: 296
Subjects: American Studies.; Health Sciences, Nursing.
Description: As any group formally emerges in society, it uses cultural norms and references as models. Nursing first emerged in the late nineteenth century. The purpose of this study was to identify and describe which reference groups nurses used as models, how beliefs, values and practices of these groups were modified to meet nursing's unique characteristics and needs, and how this new formation was articulated to its members through nursing journals. I read and analyzed articles, editorials, letters to the editor and other features in four nursing journals published before 1900. I "thickly described" the ideas that addressed characteristics, behaviors, job performance, and formal organization as assumptions, assertions or debates. I also described the journal as cultural artifacts using this same framework.

The journal-writings indicate that medicine was the primary referent when alluding to formal nursing organization. On the other hand, when describing nurse's characteristics, women's attributes predominated as norms. When journals described the nurse's relationship to the patient, norms relating to women were also prominent. In doctor-nurse interactions, however, military metaphors predominated. In the nurse's ability to make a living, the business model was added. Nursing journals themselves used a combination of practices from medical journals and women's magazines. Certain ideas about these norms were implicitly assumed, others were actively asserted and yet others debated.

These models all reflected cultural beliefs, values, and practices, but in combination they produced meanings, becoming interpreters for this new profession. Journals articulated ideas to its members on how to negotiate journal-making, formal organization, and job performance through various and sometimes contrary prescriptions about how nurses should carry out these practices.

In the late nineteenth-century, nursing was an aspiring profession. But what was asserted about professionalism contracted what was assumed about women's attributes and capabilities. Nursing's major problem, then as now, relates to its role and aspirations, that is, how it can operate as a profession in a society that devalues its primary function, that of caring.
Notes: Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 49-04, Section: A, page: 0856.

Thesis (PH.D.)--THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA, 1987.

School code: 0096.