Devices & Desires: Gender, Technology, and American Nursing

By Margarete Sandelowski

Book Overview

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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 080784893X
• ISBN13: 9780807848937
• Release Date: November 2000
• Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.1" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

Changed the way I think

This book changed the way I nurse, the way I think of myself as a nurse and the way I think about nursing, in fact, the way I think about myself as a person. It makes me realize that if nurses are to be more than technicians, that nursing is primarily an ethical exercise. Who you are, your character, directs what you do with the knowledge you have. Any skill, nursing or otherwise, can be used for good or ill. It is the one wielding the skill that aims at the mark. Sometimes you miss, but if you don't aim, hitting is just dumb luck and a poor bet. I apply the same logic to physicians, plumbers, priests, politicians, judges, and garage mechanics. Margaret Sandelowski, I hope you read this. Thanks.