Several nurses are in my family and among my close friends, both male and female. I know them to be loving and caring people, people who would help anyone regardless of any background the person may have. The nurse in the book/film, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nurse Ratched, has come to stand for the epitome of the opposite type, an evil nurse, someone who is not really in the healing, caregiving business. No, Ratched was a manipulative person who reveled in using her position to control those in her care. She felt her patients were beneath her. This story is of one such nurse, but she is not a fictional character.
This particular nurse suffered from the delusion that she saw visions and received special instructions from another, non-physical plane of existence. And that voice or those voices told her that she was right and everyone–everyone–was wrong. That alone should have disqualified her in most hospitals. But add to this that she felt that the voices told her that white folks were superior to any other race. As such, she gave preference to that segment of society over other groups.
But it gets worse. Rather than simply be willing to nurse anyone who was sick, this woman decided that the old dictum that, “Cleanliness is next to Godliness” should be actively pursued. However, this nurse took it to a metaphorical extreme; she felt that if someone was unclean by reason of skin color or religion–not necessarily unsanitary, you see–that the person didn’t deserve her help. This is a racism that is absolutely deplorable in any profession, but is rings especially harsh in nursing.
Take her work at face value. When working with the government of New Zealand, this nurse purposely and with malice advised the health organization to provide a lower level of heath care to Māori patients than those of European descent. Read that again–a nurse in the not too distant past advised a government to show preferential health care to one ethnicity over another. Understandably, the New Zealand Nurses Organization (NZNO) soundly condemned her stance. Racism and exclusion, they correctly pointed out, have no place not only in nursing but also not in society at large.
And, surprisingly, she did not care for women doctors. No, this nurse was Old School. She said that women should be nurses and men should be doctors. The women she knew who were doctors were, in her words, “no better than third-rate men.” Not sure whom she was insulting there, but you get the point. Women’s place, she felt, was not being in charge of care but merely assisting in the care of the patient. Women, she insisted, were much too flighty to be trusted with doctor-y things. And, while some might say that she was merely a product of her time, that shouldn’t be used as an excuse to perpetuate the racism and misogyny she practiced throughout her long life. Simply because she believed these horrid things as did many of her time still does not make them right.
Yet, much of the western world at least seems bent on making Florence Nightingale the epitome of what a nurse should be.
The Rest of the Story 