Knowledge, care and control

The chapter examines the spatialisation of nurses and nursing activities in the modern hospital, including nurses’ stations and nurses’ homes, within a framework of knowledge, care and control. The development of the modern hospital saw the role of nurses reconfigured, as they moved from being carers to becoming active professionals who played key roles in administering and managing work processes, undertaking medical observations and keeping standardised records. Increasingly, the nurses’ station was a mobilisation point for medical documentation and communication, encouraged by new technologies that in turn encouraged more efficient and more standardised methods of observation. Large residential wings, often with expansive training and recreation facilities – nurses’ homes – became prominent buildings on the British, North American and Australian hospital campus during the first half of the twentieth century. The designs of these buildings encouraged wholesome living within a carefully controlled social environment. But as social expectations changed and nurses ceased living on hospital grounds, many of the great dormitory buildings were abandoned. Some have been reconfigured for other uses, some demolished, while some remain, ambivalent monuments to an earlier era of institutional development and the development of nursing as a discipline and profession.