ABSTRACT
For centuries nurses have cared for the most vulnerable of us. Through this professional practice, they encounter patients who embody corporal and individual differences – patients who embody otherness. The nature of nursing itself implies that those who care must do so in situations where the images of sickness are as difficult as they are often violent. To oversee this aspect of practice would suggest that nurses are capable of distancing themselves from the images of mutilation, amputation, necrosis, and contamination rising out of bodies that excrete, expire, transpire and putrefy.
