From books to cinema: here's why the imagery around the nurse can and must change

Does the dress make the man? The old adage that the image that a person, a professional, offers of himself can be judged irrelevant compared to the content he expresses, leaves one perplexed when one goes from the surface to the depths. That decorum and professional image that the nursing team still struggles so hard to achieve, both within the professional enclave and outside it, is demonstrated and confirmed by the faintly contoured perception that society reveals.

"I have never received so many messages, at most a couple a week, someone passing through Milan or Cristina, a chubby girl from Martina who is studying to be a nurse in Milan and with whom I have gone a couple of times to Thursday night parties. "Why do you study to learn how to give an injection?" "Much more than to stay as one" ('È proibito amare' by Mario Desiati). Although there is profound confusion in society's imagination about the role, skills and course of study that nursing professions undertake, writers all seem to have very clear ideas on the subject. The fact is that the term nurse in the story includes everyone who is not elected to the rank of doctor. Everyone, but really everyone. It seems almost necessary then, for many writers, to describe a certain corporeity for nurses, implying the indispensable requirement of physicality to carry out a 'job' that requires powerful arms and sometimes some cognitive skills.

"Nurse Maria, however, looked exactly like Nurse Maria. Fat and motherly, cheerful and chatty, she clattered in her rubber clogs and, speaking in a voice that was always too loud, she immediately made that horrible situation seem normal' ('Gli occhi di Sara' by Maurizio De Giovanni). If the imaginary overpowers the image, the problem becomes even more relevant and generates confusion and misunderstanding, contributing to some extent to make the low attractiveness of the nursing professions even more concrete. The figure of the paramedic (neither a doctor nor a nurse, but a technical figure) then emerges from the American television or literary scenes to confuse matters, and for Italian translators, the choice of terminology to be used has never been an arzigogolo, given the hands-down use of the word 'paramedici'.

But the media representation of nurses and, above all, nurses, does not live by paper alone. Film and television have drawn heavily on the world of healthcare to connote - positively or negatively - a series of characters who have gone down in history. Personalities that are sometimes so strong that they almost make one forget the profession they were in.

The co-star of the famous Someone Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, together with the immense Jack Nicholson, was Nurse Mildred Ratched, a figure who embodies the concept of rigid and dehumanising authority. A character that has recently lived a life of its own thanks to the Netflix TV series entitled, precisely, Ratched, which tells of the origins of Mildred, a nurse who arrives in Northern California in 1947 with the hope of being able to work in a prestigious psychiatric hospital where new (and disturbing) experiments on the human mind are carried out.