Comments on: Hospital Dramas Shift Focus to Nurses

By: mrs spock

mrs spock — Sun, 24 May 2009 02:57:39 +0000

I quit watching medical dramas years ago- it irked me to death to see the way nurses were portrayed- or completely ignored.

By: Judith Lienhard

Judith Lienhard — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:23:19 +0000

I agree that on ER, nurses were involved in the work. If you watch something like Grey’s Anatomy, you might not know that nurses are involved in health care.
If you would like to see a series that intertwines professional and personal lives well and shows the problems of hospital staffing, get the BBC series William and Mary from netflix. It is about a midwife and undertaker, people at the opposite ends of life, meeting and falling in love. I am a maternity nurse and loved the births and scenarios shown, the tensions between midwives and doctors and love the way pregnancy is treated.

By: Laura

Laura — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:03:17 +0000

Now, I haven’t seen any of these shows — so this is pure speculation.

But doesn’t it seem that representations of nurses tend to fall into a fairly consistent binary (something like the virgin/whore binary that objectified representations of women have long fallen into)? I’d call it the underdog/weirdo binary.

Nurses are either the underappreciated, underpaid, underdog moral bastion in the male-dominated cesspool of medicine. Or they are the strange and wacky sidekicks.

“ER” is one of the few shows to go in-depth into the lives of nurses — so applaud them for that.