ABSTRACT
From the seeming chaos of war zones and emergency rooms to the ritualized order of forensic psychiatric settings and many other practice environments, nurses often experience feelings of disgust and repulsion in their practice. For these intense feelings to occur, an abject object must exist. Cadaverous, sick, disabled bodies, troubled minds, wounds, vomit, faeces, and so forth are all part of nursing work and threaten the clean and proper bodies of nurses. The unclean side of nursing is rarely accounted for in academic literature: it is silenced (Holmes, Perron, and O’Byrne 2006).
