The Media's Image of Nurses

There isn’t much on television these days that I watch, but “Grey’s Anatomy” is my guilty pleasure.

True, the series is over-the-top when it comes to portraying the lives and loves of surgical residents in a Seattle hospital. Writers have even placed this fictitious hospital across the street from the popular Pike’s Market on the waterfront. If you’ve been to Seattle, though, you know that’s about as impossible as some of the story lines.

Nevertheless, I’ve gotten so wrapped up in the minutiae of this medical soap opera that it wasn’t until I read a recent article by freelance writer Jana Hanbury that I realized that the series’ writers have committed a sin. “Grey’s” is guilty of portraying nurses as “handmaidens to the physicians” and “not that bright.”

Perhaps I missed that point because nurses in the series are mostly insignificant characters—and maybe that’s a problem, too.

In her article, Hanbury also recounts the varied images of nurses created by the media throughout the years.

We’ve all seen a comic portrayal of the nurse as rough, tough, gruff and ugly. I usually laugh along with everyone, but it’s odd that there also exists the diametrically opposed sexy image as projected by “Hot Lips” Houlihan in the movie and television series “M*A*S*H.”

And who can forget the devil-incarnate Nurse Ratchet in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”?

We can be thankful for a few movies in which nurses are deemed heroic and hard-working like 2007 Academy Award-nominated film “Atonement” and the 2001 film “Pearl Harbor.”

Hanbury maintains that “the media is a powerful instrument that has an enormous impact on perceptions of life as portrayed on television, movies and the Internet.”

I’m not as sure about that.

I don’t deny the media’s influence, but when it comes to real life, I think most people respect the person who says he or she is a nurse. I believe most of the public can discern the difference between make-believe and the real thing.

What do you think?

Do the media incorrectly portray registered nurses on the big and small screens?

Have you had an experience in which someone clearly has misconstrued the nature of your profession?

Did you read any of the “Cherry Ames” book series about the job-hopping, sleuth/nurse that were so popular between 1940s and the 1970s? If so, did they influence your choice of profession?

What are your favorite or least favorite fictional nurses?