In Search of Sympathy: Stereotypes and Stiff Upper Lips in Interwar Nursing

From this starting point on the eve of the Second World War, this work looks back through the complex--and often conflicting--representations of British nursing in the inter-war era, from the impact of the Nursing Registration Act of 1919 to the romanticized figure of Edith Cavell and the lingering specter of the angelic Nightingale nurse. It examines how attitudes to gender and class influenced representations of nursing, and how those attitudes themselves changed during this period. It considers why the visual image of the nurse was so prominent in portrayals of nursing, and perhaps most importantly of all, what impact those stereotypes of nursing had for those at the vanguard of a fledgling profession.

This e-single originally appeared as a chapter in The Nurse in Popular Media: Critical Essays edited by Marcus K. Harmes, Barbara Harmes and Meredith A. Harmes. The electronic version of this book chapter is an open access work licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). Users are allowed to share, with proper attribution, the unaltered chapter for non-commercial purposes. All other rights are reserved.