The Nurse in Popular Media: Critical Essays by Marcus K. Harmes

Author:Marcus K. Harmes,
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2021-10-28T00:00:00+00:00

Hierarchies

The matron is notable as a constant through these different iterations of nursing in popular culture on both film and television and their ­cross-overs. One presides over the Nightingale wards of the Carry On films, another over the wards of Oxbridge Hospital in Emergency Ward 10. To what extent is that leadership model misleadingly invoked in popular culture? Matrons, originally housekeepers or chatelaines but eventually senior nurses, had a long history in British hospitals (Helmstadter, 2002: 328). Although the matron retained currency as a cultural archetype, as an actual member of the nursing profession she fell into obsolescence. The change in leadership, hierarchy, and titles took place alongside other existential changes to nursing practice, such as the gradual replacement of the Nightingale wards with private or ­semi-private rooms (Ayliffe and English, 2003: 118) and changing demographics as more men joined the nursing profession, rendering the traditional but sharply gendered terms “matron” and “sister” impractical.

Changes in training, practice and leadership are captured in fine detail in the novel and television adaptation of the novel Shroud for a Nightingale. The novel, a 1971 detective story by P.D. James, became a 1984 miniseries made by Anglia Television. The Anglia adaptations of all of James’s novels thoroughly and faithfully adapted plots, characters and dialogue, in many instances word for word, in the scripts, and the television version therefore faithfully brought James’s story onto the screen. Like most other P.D. James stories, the environment is hermetic. James was herself the product of institutional backgrounds. She had been a hospital administrator and worked in the Home Office, and her novels take place within environments that are close knit in terms of the people but also the physical environment, such as barristers’ chambers in the Inns of Court, a clinic, a museum and in Shroud for a Nightingale, a hospital and the attached nurses’ home and training school.

The 1971 publication of the book made play with the disjunction between homicide and the healing to be associated with nursing, and the book’s cover for its first edition was a macabre image of a grinning skull wearing a white nurse’s cap. The television adaptation noted and deployed similar imagery; at the climax of the story a nursing sister dies in a fire and viewers see her charred body, surrounded by the burnt remains of her uniform. Both the novel and its faithful television adaptation also create a space for the disjunction between killing and healing, situating murder in the environment of the hospital and even unsettling expectations. The nurse’s home (in a converted Victorian mansion) is called “Nightingale House,” leading characters new to the scene to reasonably assume it is named after Florence Nightingale. However it is, instead, named after its Victorian builder, a cruel patriarch responsible for a young woman’s death a century before. The oddness in naming, the subversion of expectations, the association of the name Nightingale with a cruel male killer rather than the ­high-minded female founder of nursing, all serve to unsettle the storytelling and the atmosphere.

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