Abstract
ABSTRACT Objective: reflecting on Florence Nightingale’s legacy from the perspective of the concept of habitus, proposed by Pierre Bourdieu. Methods: theoretical reflection on Florence Nightingale’s legacy in nursing based on the description of her contribution to health care and professional training in nursing, which allowed them to be consolidated as a new professional habitus grounded in accumulation of symbolic capital, especially scientific and social ones. Results: important aspects of Florence Nightingale’s family life, considered the first social contact and locus of incorporation of a habitus, determined her social relationships and investment opportunities, with implications for her professional life. Additionally, Nightingale contributed to global nursing by adding to it meaningful symbolic assets, since she overcame challenges and presented positive evidence that resulted from a care model. Conclusion: the contribution of the founder of modern nursing must be known, grasped, and remembered, because her achievements were the result of a professional identity shaped by rituals, symbols, discipline, and power.
Highlights
The year 2020 celebrated the bicentenary (1820–2020) of Florence Nightingale, precursor and founder of modern nursing. Because of this important date, the World Health Organization chose 2020 as the global Year of the Nurse and Midwife, an initiative that gave nursing worldwide visibility and disseminated voices, values, and knowledge in the area. This commemorative date occurred in a unique historical moment of recent health care
On December 31, 2020, the world registered 7,675,973 COVID-19 cases and 194,949 deaths associated with the disease
Brazil was the third country with the highest number of confirmed cases, not to mention underreporting[1]
Summary
The year 2020 celebrated the bicentenary (1820–2020) of Florence Nightingale, precursor and founder of modern nursing. Habitus refers to something historical related to something individual and must be understood as a property of actors (whether individuals, groups, or institutions) aligned with the objective structures from which it results, because it is our material living conditions that originate our countless experiences of possibilities and impossibilities, shaping our unconscious sense of possible, that is, our understanding of our rightful place in the social world[4] This concept is a key one in the lens that Bourdieu used to see that habitus generates distinct and distinguishing practices that express interiorization of the exterior and exteriorization of the interior. The regularity of these rituals, exemplified mainly by graduation ceremonies, associated with emblems (flags, medals, statues, pictures), and witnessed by important people in Brazilian history, health and nursing history, disseminated the long-lasting requirements inherent in the instituted identity, so as to keep the conditions to preserve this identity[10,11] During her activities in the Crimean War, deaths caused by infection decreased from 42% to 2.2% over just a few months. It is necessary to consider here that communication relationships are, in an inseparable way, power relationships, because they can name, that is, point out, and make exist effectively, and, transmit and consecrate a social identity[13]
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