Devices & Desires: Gender, Technology, and American Nursing

Nursing and technology have been inexorably linked since the beginnings of trained nursing in the United States in the late nineteenth century. Whether or not they thought of the devices they used as technology, nurses have necessarily used a variety of tools, instruments, and machines--from thermometers to cardiac monitors--to appraise, treat, and comfort patients. Tracing the relationship between nursing and technology from the 1870s to the present, Margarete Sandelowski argues that technology has helped shape and intensify persistent dilemmas in nursing and that it has both advanced and impeded the development of the profession.

Sandelowski examines key moments in the history of nursing that dramatize the ironies of the nursing-technology relationship. She demonstrates that nurses both embraced and rejected technology in their pursuit of cultural visibility and professional autonomy--with varying amounts of success.

As one of the domains of female work historically most subject to sex segregation, Sandelowski notes, nursing provides an ideal site in which to examine the interplay of technology and gender.

Author: Margarete Sandelowski
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Published: 11/27/2000
Pages: 320
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.08lbs
Size: 9.21h x 6.14w x 0.71d
ISBN: 9780807848937

Review Citation(s):
Choice 04/01/2001 pg. 1493

About the Author
Sandelowski, Margarete: - Margarete Sandelowski is Cary C. Boshamer Distinguished Professor of Nursing at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a Fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. Her books include Pain, Pleasure, and American Childbirth: From the Twilight Sleep to the Read Method, 1914-1960 and With Child in Mind: Studies of the Personal Encounter with Infertility.