Nursing Inquiry

Nelson, Sioban; Holmes, Dave

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00161.xpmid: 12622798

Holmes, Dave; Federman, Cary

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00162.xpmid: 12622799

The aim of this article is to bring to the attention of the international nursing community the discrepancy between a pervasive ‘caring’ nursing discourse and a most unethical nursing practice in the United States. In this article, we present a duality: the conflict in American prisons between nursing ethics and the killing machinery. The US penal system is a setting in which trained healthcare personnel practice the extermination of life. We look upon the sanitization of deathwork as an application of healthcare professionals’ skills and knowledge and their appropriation by the state to serve its ends. A review of the states’ death penalty statutes shows that healthcare workers are involved in the capital punishment process and shielded by American laws (and to a certain extent by professional boards through their inaction). We also argue that the law's language often masks that involvement; and explain how states further that duplicity behind legal formalisms. In considering the important role healthcare providers, namely nurses and physicians, play in administering death to the condemned, we assert that nurses and physicians are part of the states’ penal machinery in America. Nurses and physicians (as carriers of scientific knowledge, and also as agents of care) are intrinsic to the American killing enterprise. Healthcare professionals who take part in execution protocols are state functionaries who approach the condemned body as angels of death: they constitute an extension of the state which exercises its sovereign power over captive prisoners.

Meyer, Dagmar Estermann; De Oliveira, Dora Lúcia

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00154.xpmid: 12622800

Breastfeeding policies and the production of motherhood: a historical–cultural approach

Lindahl, Berit; Sandman, Per‐Olof; Rasmussen, Birgit H.

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00160.xpmid: 12622801

Meanings of living at home on a ventilator

Lagerwey, Mary D.

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00159.xpmid: 12622802

Clerical frames for nursing practice: missionary nurses at Rehoboth

Gilbert, Tony

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00155.xpmid: 12622803

Exploring the dynamics of power: A Foucauldian analysis of care planning in learning disabilities services

Shakespeare, Pam

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00158.xpmid: 12622804

Nurses’ bodywork: is there a body of work?

Rankin, Janet M.

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00156.xpmid: 12622805

‘Patient satisfaction’: Knowledge for ruling hospital reform — An institutional ethnography

Draper, Jan

doi: 10.1046/j.1440-1800.2003.00157.xpmid: 12622806

Men's passage to fatherhood: an analysis of the contemporary relevance of transition theory