The rhetoric of rupture: Nursing as a practice with a history?

In this paper we argue that nursing is consistently presented as a practice without a history, constantly reinventing itself within new professional and technical realms. This rupture with and repudiation of a past deemed to be pejorative, coupled with a rebirth in a “preferred present,” raises recurrent problems in the construction of nursing's contemporary professional identity and search for social legitimacy. Furthermore, constituting new nursing knowledge and practice as discontinuous with the past produces a sense of historical dislocation of that nursing knowledge and practice that, in turn, reproduces the need for relocation through reinvention. This phenomenon, which we term the “rhetoric of rupture,” in our view, arises from nursing's frustrated attempts to gain social status and legitimacy. Paradoxically, this constant reinvention in fact hampers nurses' attempts to gain that status and legitimacy.