ABSTRACT
This chapter captures a few simple stereotypes of the clinical trades, to distil service managers' views of the worst organizational attributes of medicine and nursing - the features that made radical reform so essential in their eyes. Medical individualism was equally apparent in the distinctive way in which doctors' participation in management decision making was reported. One key contrast that managers drew between medicine and nursing thus lay in doctors' individualism and nurses' subordination. Medicine was backed by several hundred years of scientific investigation and its students had received a university level education for over one hundred years. Medical syndicalism rested on medical knowledge; nursing hierarchy on nursing ignorance. Doctors were independent professionals, possessing a fierce autonomy in their clinical judgement; nursing was not a profession and was notorious for its hierarchy, indeed, for an almost military discipline. Doctors were famed for their solidarity when threatened, nurses renowned for the ease with which they gave way.
