INTRODUCTION

 

The aim of this text is for it to be read, one could say, understanding reading as a productive rather than a reproductive process. In this way, reading is a social process, not an individual one. It is important to share our doubts and thereby open our subject matter, since I believe that the biggest problem does not reside in socializing uncertainties. On the contrary, the problem is sustaining those obstacles that brick up possible exits to our profession.

Ideas are intertwined between fallacies and a certain kind of reasoning is born that blocks collective debates about the evolution of a profession. Thus, the profession depends on a reasoning that can be compared to a no-exit alley. The need to publish this book is rooted in the idea that “intellectual colonization is the mechanism through which values are bread in the colonized one in order to maintain the subordination and marginalization from the discussion space”.

The most important source of motivation for this project were those fruitless searches looking for productions that could account for and answer some of the questions that arise in the presence of historical moments with a rich social and political participation of the members of the our profession. These stretches remain left out and hidden in the official history of nursing. Due to to the lack of self-questioning, the nursing profession allows the silencing of documentary sources that promote doubt and questions. The result is the closing of its own history. As long as the events that strongly question the present tradition are left encrypted and no interventions are made to analyze these events, the autonomy and the professional expansion of the nursing tradition are severely limited.

In other words, there can be no professional empowerment without examining the historical records. In this sense, the lack of material related to the history of Argentine nursing is an indicator of the subordination with which it disciplines itself. The educational sphere is characterized by a naive and romantic, almost childish, narrative that is centered around the idealization of Florence Nightingale’s figure. This narrative, however, excludes many of the variables that influenced the foundation of modern nursing in England during the 1860s.

The esteem of the problems that emerge in the national professional collective disregard the geographic and temporal anchorage, and have no consideration of direct and indirect precedents, and even less so they analyze the consequences of the decisions that its own members have taken over time.

All of this promotes an identity weakness. Almost without a past, the nursing profession cannot understand its own present, thinking of itself over a reality that it won't even dare to know. The essential links to critically analyze the current state of the profession are missing. The omission of the political, social and economic factors that influenced in each phase of the historic process is naturalized. An "aseptic" outlook of

the history of the profession in Argentina, i.e.: with no ideological anchorage and any possible doubt is foreclosed.

Five scarcely visible moments from the history of nursing tradition have been selected for this book. This does not mean that they are more important than those periods that are excluded, but the guiding thread in the present selection is the intellectual colonization: the tensions that operate in favor of subordination, the denial of emancipating actions taken by members of the profession and the invisibility of everything that could put the naive speech at risk.

According to José Siles González (2004) "the essential challenge in order to take a free step to the result of the actual process of building the history of nursing resides in making a effort towards the deconstruction of those clichés that stop (Derrida, 1998) the transition from a kind of nursing lacking of history to a professional group that can be applied at least to the creation and management of its own historic memory; this is, to facilitate moving from the domestic and gender coordinates typical of the domestic sphere to the reserves whose boundaries frame nursing within the limits of science and professionalism.

This work has been arranged in five chapters and a closing section with the aim of untangle those aspects that tie down our chances of moving forward.

 

In the first chapter "The Colonization and health care; encounter of cultures? the question is addressed since the arrival of conqueror Pedro De Mendoza and the women that accompanied the expedition.,We also follow some aspects of the Dessert Conquest and the health care issue, through a critical itinerary that tries to refute the interpretation adopted by medical historicism that identify us as "male nurses" according to a sexist division of labor. We question the profession's official history that reinforces stereotyped concepts and appeals to a religious-vocational matrix for the professional practice because it voids the possibility of managing nursing autonomy. Nothing emerges from the official history but a chronological list of events related to the creation of institutions and corporate activities strongly involved with religious activism and ecclesiastical hierarchy's interests.

 

In the second chapter "The public health revolution. Tensions and rupture: Nursing during the Carrillo Administration" we address the events during the intense social and political change that was taking place in Argentina in the middle of 20th. Century. A shift in health paradigm was fertilized by the “national and popular movement” and had a big impact in nursing. We analyze the changes and consequences of of Dr. Carrillo's first administration as Minister of Health, being Carrillo a prime mover of the nursing role as a mandatory link in the first Peronist project. Carrillo, clearly placed within the “national and popular movement”, needed a social inclusion device. During the peak of the health revolution, two institutions coexisted: the Nursing School, dependent of the Ministry of Health; and, as a part of the same project, the Eva Peron Foundation Nursing School (EPFNS). This last two institutions understood that the purpose was to build a modern and renewed professional body in which the public health aspect of the political project could be identified.

In this chapter, we characterize the EPFNS' nurses and we analyze the abandonment of a professional profile based on a religious stereotype that impregnated the professional spaces (including the Ministry if Health's Nursing school).

We also examine the evident and deep differences that obstructed this two schools from meeting in a joint project, and we also analyze the role that EPFNS graduates played as advocates for the women's right to vote and the conformation of the Feminist & Peronist Party, that could finally be able to place the first assemblywomen in Congress.

 

In the third chapter "The political activism of nurses: resistance and struggle during the second half of 20th. century" we address an important aspect frequently left out in the educational, corporate and practice spheres: the political participation of nurses and the resistance they offered to the bloody dictatorial governments that took power in Argentina during the 50s, 60s and 70s. .

Union participation (as a mean to create power spaces) is an absent element in the nursing profession. This clearly rises as a denied reality, since associations tended to keep the profession as "unpolitical". Therefore, it was necessary to even repress the existence of disappeared and murdered political activists, professionals and students. The lack of participation alleged by professional associations was a way to justify their poor progress -and constant backward steps- as an organization. This casts away given the denial they've consummated by erasing any political participation trace of tortured, disappeared and murdered colleagues during the dictatorial period from 1955 to 1983

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In the fourth chapter "The actions of Argentine nurses during the 20th. Century's war" we try to come closer to another stretch made invisible. The one related to the role of Argentine nurses during the war in the South Atlantic in 1982. Another concealed issue is the role played by Argentine nurses during the events that took place during the war between Argentina and England over sovereignty in the English colonial settlement in Malvinas Islands. There was an overwhelming amount of draftee soldiers killed in action. The consequences are still visible today, as crippled soldiers and suicides rates among them tells us about a tortuous past for war veterans, including nurses. There is no recollection of the nursing role in this scenario. Those "lost" histories of colleagues that are still practicing nursing are being ignored, as ignored as Malvina's veterans are. Because of this, during the fourth chapter we rescue the voice of those who where in the theater of operations.

In the fifth chapter: "Invisibility of training and practice control supremacy" we analyze the denial of power, both in the training and practice control, in spite of the legal framework available. The explanation given by the professional organizations was that there was an absence of a law that could regulate the nursing practice was preventing the adoption of deeply rooted changes as well as care quality assurance and appropriate practice conditions. This exposes (even after twenty years of the passing of bill No. 24.004) the need that professional associations, training institutions and the professional collective had to erase from the official history all those instances that promoted tensions and struggle over the control of the nursing profession. Since the second decade of 20th. Century.

 

The closing section "Opening the question: weak ones? Sophisms and subordination" discusses the nursing collective power. Here we can again appreciate the consequences of the the collective memory' s effacement: identity weakness that results in disciplining

In words of Rodolfo Walsh, that are also appropriate to analyze what's going in the nursing profession, “our dominant classes have always assure that the working classes have no history, no doctrine, no heroes and nor martyr ones. Each struggle must start over, separated from previous struggles: the collective experience is lost, lessons are forgotten. This way, history seams to be private property whose owners are also the owners of everything.”