Similar views of nursing are on display at the multiplex. In the otherwise excellent movie Living Out Loud, the heroine, a nurse played by Holly Hunter, is dumped by her doctor husband. After drinking herself into bed every night--and assuaging her loneliness by hiring a male prostitute--she decides to get her life together. How? By becoming a pediatrician.

Without an MD to elevate her social status, a nurse is not only dumb, she's the butt--quite literally--of the worst kind of sexism. There is a straight line running from the porn queen in Deep Throat to the sexy killer nurse in the recent video The Nurse. The cover of this slightly more tame Deep Throat sports the ubiquitous symbol of the bimbo nurse--a headless female torso, dressed in a crisp white nurse's uniform with opaque white hose held up with garters. In this version, a stiletto knife is cunningly slipped between stocking and flesh. The cover copy reads, "The Nurse, Registered to Kill. Pray She's Not on Call."

And then there are the news media, where nurses are largely absent from healthcare coverage. In 1991 several colleagues and I documented this fact in a study of sources quoted for healthcare stories in the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times. Although reporters had added any number of female phone numbers to their Rolodexes of healthcare experts--physicians, hospital administrators, insurance company spokespeople--nurses were not among them. Indeed, nurses were among the least quoted in the healthcare universe. In 1998 another study looked at the news media and nursing and found that little had changed in the ensuing eight years. In other words, when reporters cover the latest developments in experimental cancer treatment, you can be almost certain of one thing: They will routinely question the doctors on the impact such treatments have on cancer cells, but never the nurses who can talk about their impact on patients' lives.

Whatever the medium, the media consistently reflect the traditional Adam's rib view of nursing, which has been assiduously promoted by organized medicine. In spite of the fact that traditional views of women as men's handmaidens have largely been discredited, they are alive and well in healthcare. The American Medical Association and many physicians still refer to nurses as "physician-extenders," "mid-level professionals," "non-physician providers" or the "doctor's eyes and ears."

Given the persistence of such Victorian views of female caregiving, it is not surprising that so many of the critics who applauded Wit mention the play's hero only in passing or are downright hostile to the character. In New York magazine, John Simon scornfully dismissed her as "a well-meaning airhead." In The New Yorker, critic Nancy Franklin's aversion to the nurse was almost palpable. She described Pizzi's character as "an oncology nurse who embodies the milk--condensed milk--of human kindness." (Franklin should hope that when she lies dying, none of her caregivers will present her with a can opener and the suggestion that she console herself when she rings the nurse's buzzer.) Like the Tuesday night talk-back I attended, more extended discussions of the play tend to focus on physicians. Thus, a lively exchange in the New York Times Health Science section was sparked when a research physician wrote a commentary protesting the portrayal of the doctors in Wit.

Ironically, feminists have been slow to respond to the treatment of nurses in the media and in the healthcare system. Is it because they have been so brainwashed by the physicians' handmaiden image of nursing that they, too, devalue a profession whose origins are firmly rooted in feminist struggle and whose contemporary battles are profoundly influenced by gender? The medical/media devaluation of nursing makes this one of the last great undiscovered feminist issues and one whose fate is increasingly relevant to us all.

As we move into the twenty-first century, the healthcare problems we face--aging, chronic illness, increased disability--are not problems medicine alone can remedy. This is nowhere more obvious than in the care of the dying. As Wit makes clear, good nursing care is the best hope for returning compassion to modern medicine. That's why the general public needs to recognize and acknowledge the importance of nurses and support nursing organizations and unions in the fight for safe staffing ratios and other vital patient-protection measures. The fact is that good nurses are far more than doctors' eyes and ears. They are doctors' brains as well.

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