Nurses' work: the sacred and the profane

Abstract

Today, birth, suffering, healing, and death--all powerful experiences--are closely associated with nurses. In Nurses' Work, The Sacred and The Profane, Zane Robinson Wolf reveals and examines the rituals nurses unconsciously establish to help them face their everyday involvement with the sacred events of human life. The nurses on 7H (a medical unit in the large urban hospital where Wolf did her research), like nurses everywhere, are under tremendous pressure. They must balance the more mundane tasks incolved in caring for the sick with a daunting variety of moral and ethical dilemmas. A nurse can, on any given day, go from emptying a bedpan to participating in a decision whether to resuscitate a terminally ill patient. Rituals--patterned, symbolic actions--help nurses perform their difficult tasks. In this insightful study, Wolf considers the universal nursing rituals associated with change-of-shift report, administering medication, bathing patients, and, most significantly, providing post-mortem care. Because she is a nurse, Wolf brings firsthand knowledge of the day-to-day work of nurses to her innovative examination of these widely practiced but little studied rituals. Nurses' Work, The Sacred and The Profane will be invaluable to nurses, historians and teachers of nursing, and sociologists.