ABSTRACT
The most significant feature of modern Japan’s medical development was the emergence of professionalism. With the institutionalization of medical practice, those who had provided medical care were distinguished under different professional categories, such as doctor, midwife, and nurse, with regulations and qualifications. Japanese modernization and industrialization involved people’s obsession with wider knowledge and new technology, particularly those forms developed in the West, and professionalism was closely associated with such intellectual and technological advance. If the nurse was a creature of modern professionalism, she should have gained public recognition in relation to her scientific knowledge and skills. However, public views of the nurse were more often related to perceptions of female virtue than to modern attainments. This chapter will consider nurses’ position in physical space in order to explore public perception of the nursing profession. I shall begin with the legal position of the Japanese woman in this period and define the social implications of the space in which she lived in order to consider the constraints and possibilities which these created for the work of domiciliary and of hospital nurses.
