Modern movie-making no longer stereotypes nurses – but there is a danger of the profession being painted in a dark light, according to a new analysis.
In the early films nurses were depicted as heroines and self-sacrificial, according to the analysis in the Journal of Advanced Nursing.
Some 26 per cent of the 280 films studied by Australian nursing lecturer Dr David Stanley had sexual representations of nurses.
He said that from the 1960s darker representations of nursing began to appear – possibly reflecting the growing independence experienced by women.
Dr Stanley, of Curtin University of Technology, Perth, said: "I noticed that as the nursing profession has grown there has been a corresponding decline in the representation of the self-sacrificial nurse in feature films, with a corresponding growth of dark nurses, who are able to be both powerful and evil.
"In previous decades nurses had appeared in murder mysteries and in sinister roles – mainly in the 1930s – but when we get to the 1960s we start seeing nurses appearing more often in psychological thrillers or as psychopathic killers.
"The dark nurse did not always play an evil role, but they often represented the liberation of a repressed inner self in line with the development of women’s power in the 1990s."
He added: "The dawn of the 21st century sees the trend for films with strong, professional assertive self-confident nurses continuing and growing."
Journal of Advanced Nursing. 64.1, pp 84-95. (October 2008).
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