From the advent of the use of anaesthesia during surgery through the Second World War, confusion and competition over who should administer the technology - doctors or nurses - dominated gendered discussions of professional boundaries. Using information about practice in the United States, the United Kingdom, and France in this period, we find vastly different outcomes for nurse-administered anaesthesia. Differences in perceptions regarding the gendered nature of this technology and its related level of prestige largely determined who could practice it. When administering anaesthesia carried low prestige and was viewed as non-technical, it fell under the purview of women's work in medicine, that is, nursing. When the same technology gained prestige and became perceived as a technical, medical skill, doctors associated it with their masculine professional identity and worked to exclude nurses from administering anaesthesia.
Keyphrases
- healthcare
- primary care
- mental health
- chronic pain
- quality improvement
- depressive symptoms
- physical activity
- neuropathic pain
- coronary artery bypass
- medical students
- pain management
- metabolic syndrome
- health information
- adipose tissue
- atrial fibrillation
- insulin resistance
- skeletal muscle
- pregnancy outcomes
- weight loss
- drug induced