From salvation to civics: service to the sick in nursing discourse

This paper explores the emergence of civics discourse in early 20th-century nursing. It foregrounds this discussion with an analysis of the attempt to secularise nursing that occurred in 1789 during the French Revolution. It then examines the discursive displacement of religious vocational fervour by civic and patriotic imperatives during the first two decades of the 20th century. Contemporary scholars have portrayed nursing's professional development as characterised by tension between the professional elitist agenda of the nursing leadership, and the rank and file positioning of nursing as a female occupation. By contrast, this paper focuses on the porosity of nursing to broader trends such as civic discourse, the labour movement, feminism and socialism, and works to shift our understanding of nursing's professional history from a dialectical model (professional versus industrial), to one of multiplicity in political and ethical values. It argues that civic and patriotic discourse provided the framing for the secular nurse's subjectivity and the mechanism by which nurses negotiated the moral dangers of care of the sick and male bodies without the protection of vow or veil.