Nursing traditions are a mixed blessing | nursing times

Every morning, as I enter my hospital, I pass a portrait of one of the old matrons. She’s rather fabulously turned out – a white bonnet, ruffled collar and blue cape. She looks every inch

the old-fashioned nurse, right down to the rather severe glare she’s giving the artist and, consequently, me. Sometimes I admire her outmoded dress and everything it stands for; sometimes I

think rebelliously that the hangover of her Victorian matriarchal values is the reason why nurses are not accorded the same salary and professional respect as other, comparable professions.

When I started nursing I was taught how to make a bed: pillowcases always facing away from the door. Curious, I asked why. ‘It’s in case there’s a bomb. That way the dust and dirt from the

explosion won’t fly into the pillowslip,’ I was told. I was flabbergasted. Had no one told this nurse that the Blitz was over quite some time ago now? In any case, I couldn’t imagine diving

for cover from a bomb and then finding time to break into a sweat about a grubby pillowslip. Nursing and traditions are bound as tightly as the warp and the weft. And I think that’s both a

blessing and a curse. A blessing because there are generations of dedicated and single-minded people – particularly women – behind us who were passionate about caring for those who are sick.

And a curse because the traditions of those who gave birth to us – religion and the military – do not necessarily support a profession of the 21st century. I have a love-hate relationship

with the image of nursing but I’ll try not to glower at that long-dead matron. It seems, after all, a little unfair to heap such a multitude of charged emotions on what is, after all, only a

portrait. _Arabella Sinclair-Penwarden is a staff nurse in Devon _