Between Emotional Involvement and Professional Detachment: The Challenges of Nursing in Dutch Mental Institutions (1880–1980)

Summary This article is about the tension and changing balance between emotional involvement and professional detachment in the practice of nursing in Dutch mental institutions between the 1880s and 1990s. We address this issue in relation to institutional and material conditions, power differences between doctors, nurses and patients, different treatments, and the social marginalisation of hospitalised patients. On the basis of various sources (nursing textbooks, chronicles of skills learning by students, personal accounts, questionnaires and interviews), we describe how nurses were supposed... Mehr ...