First in a Series of Seven Blogs about Drama in Nursing
“All the World’s a Stage”
“All the World’s a Stage … Even for Nurses,” writes Sharon Onevelo Watkinson, quoting Shakespeare. In 1945 that stage was the floor of the U.S. Congress. But nurses’ work always has held a sense of drama, positioned as they are in the liminal spaces between birth, life and death, sickness and health. Professor and theatre director Richard Schechner includes healing, particularly that of the shaman who cured the sick by ritualistic means, as one of the possible origins of drama and singles out surgery as a latter-day example:
“Surgery in a teaching hospital brings into play the concept of ‘performance’ in at least two of its meanings: a showing of a doing and an activity demanding the coordinated efforts of a team working together at an extremely high level of skills. Nurses hover about performing necessary tasks.” 1
“It is no coincidence that in England the operating room, once surrounded by seats for spectators, is called the ‘operating theatre,’” Watkinson begins her discussion of the similarities between the nurse and the actor. 2 Colin Adrian Holmes expands the concept to explore “possibilities for conceiving nursing practice as a form of aesthetic praxis,” that is, as a form of dramatic performance: The larger hospital, too “may be seen as the theatre, and the nurses, patients, relatives and others as actors or spectators whose scripts and dialogues are enshrined in the ‘discourse of nursing,’ the ‘discourse of patienthood,’ and so on. …. Nurses, themselves, may well be caught up in the drama they enact and the illusions they create.” 3
Holmes draws on the work of sociologist Erving Goffman, whose The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life outlines techniques by which people successfully perform roles knowingly and unknowingly analogous to actors on a stage in dramatic performance, and on that of Elizabeth Burns who explores how social and theatrical conventions of behavior are interrelated and interact from the perspectives of sociology and theatre history. Goffman’s perspective in turn expands on the work of Charles Cooley’s reflective or looking-glass self, which posits that we base our own image on how we think that others perceive us, and that a person’s outward appearance – their clothing or, in the case of nurses, their uniform – and actions are important to that presentation of self. In other words, our self-image is a reflection of how we want other people to view us. 4
Although Goffman later admitted that his attempt to press the life-as-theatre analogy so far “was in part a rhetoric and a manoeuvre,” the analogy has relevance to the field of nursing. 5 According to Goffman, when in the presence of others, people engage in impression management in order to influence how they come across and to maintain control of a situation. How people think that their behavior is received, however, may not be how others perceive it. For instance, intensive care nurses who view mastery of high-tech monitoring devices as a sign of good nursing care may be perceived differently by patients who place higher value on personal contact.
Like Cooley and Goffman, Burns predicates her work on the separation of “actor” and “spectator,” meaning that actors in on-stage productions as well as actors in ordinary life off stage rely on the response of others – their audience – to validate their behavior. According to theatre director Glen McGillivray, Burns is “wary” of the theatrical metaphor, which has been “exploited” to analyze social behavior through the notion of “role,” but is interested in why the analogy is so “compelling.” 6 Both she and Schechner note the ubiquity of dramatization and performance in everyone, everywhere in life. 7
For nurse educators, role-playing, a form of socio-drama, is an important component of teaching nursing students not simply to act like a nurse, but to think like a nurse. Placing them in simulated clinical situations requires that students demonstrate not only accommodative learning – memorizing the steps for giving an injection, for instance – but assimilative learning – actually giving an injection to a patient – as well. To professors Debbie Roberts and Richard Talbot, who compare learning to be a nurse to learning how to act and perform in a theatre course, demonstrating a skill through imitation is not sufficient. The critical thinking required of either a nursing student or a drama student requires ‘immersive performance’ in which the student does not simply take on (copy) the role of another but rather takes in (incorporates) that role to become completely engaged in it, so that the role becomes effortless, like “second nature.” 8 “Role playing is simply a less technologically elaborate form of simulations” practiced by astronauts, firefighters, musicians, pilots, soldiers – the rehearsal needed to work out complex variables, whether learning to land a plane, preparing for unexpected situations or mastering a musical instrument. 9 While all role playing is performance, not all of it is dramatically stage-worthy. But it offers an off-stage example of nursing’s link with drama.
Of the two dramatic episodes of nursing in World War II mentioned in the previous Blog (22 March 2025) – the ordeals of the nurses of Bataan, Corregidor and Santo Tomas and the events leading up a bill to draft nurses into the armed forces – the plight of the nurses in the Philippines lent itself most readily to capturing the consciousness of the American public who flocked to watch Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard and Veronica Lake portray three of those nurses in So Proudly We Hail! Released in September 1943, the film was made in cooperation with the War Department, the Army Nurse Corps and the American Red Cross; Lieutenant Eunice Hatchitt, one of the army nurses on the successful seaplane rescue mission, was assigned on military orders to serve as a technical advisor.
Moviegoers may have loved So Proudly We Hail! – it was a top-grossing film of 1943 – but the nurses about whom it was made hated it, for “it trivialized their experience’ and tarnished their image in the eyes of the public as strong, independent military members. They unfairly blamed Hachitt for the inaccurate character depictions. “The women on Bataan and Corregidor simply did what they had to do, no more and no less than the men who fought alongside them”’ writes Norman, who interviewed many of the nurses afterward. “Like every war movie ever made, the film not only reflected reigning cultural views, it reverted to clichés and types. It was storytelling, not history, and as such missed the point.” 10
As the film opens, a group of eight nurses representing those on the successful seaplane rescue mission flown from Corregidor in May 1942 have arrived in Melbourne, where they are treated to a luxurious stay in a hotel, compliments of the American Red Cross, while awaiting the next transport to the United States. All of the nurses walk off the plane except for Lieutenant Janet ‘Davy’ Davidson – the Maude Davidson character – who is carried off on a stretcher in a catatonic state. The scene shifts to a troopship, where the nurses are relaxing on deck. A doctor accompanies Davidson out on deck, explains that he is desperate to help her, pulls from his pocket a letter to Davidson from “John” – the man whom she had married the day before he left on a secret mission to procure more quinine – and asks the other nurses to relive their experiences in the Philippines. “I want you to tell me everything you can remember,” he says, “things that might not even concern her. You never know. It might have its place in the pattern.” 11
As the first nurse speaks, the flashbacks begin from the moment that the nurses embarked in San Francisco for their voyage to Hawaii, changed enroute to the Philippines through their departure from the Malinta Tunnel for the seaplane awaiting them off the coast of Corregidor. A tone of romance, at times frivolous, with which the nurses’ reminiscing begins, threads throughout the remainder of the film. According to Valerie Wieskamp, the melodramatic frame of the film “reinforces the traditional gender roles first by emphasizing the nurses’ reliance upon masculine heroism.” Even the Maude Davidson character, who was not married at the time in true life, is transformed “from a self-sufficient and independent woman to a wife incapacitated without her husband.” 12 The “treatment” is a success, and when memories of events have returned the nurses to the present, and as the physician reads the letter out loud, with its enclosed deed to a farm where the newlyweds can wait for each other, Davidson focuses her eyes and says ‘John’ as she gazes off into the now happy future.
Film critic for the New York Times Bosley Crowther praised “the unremitting realism with which Producer-Director Mark Sandrich has reenacted battle-action scenes,” but thought Sandrich unable “to parallel the reality of the setting with that of his characters,” even the three “angels in coveralls,” who gave hackneyed performances. The film’s basic fault, Crowther concluded, “is that it sets up the illusion of place but fails to maintain it with the illusion of genuine people there.” 13 The lack of realism was evident in the melodramatic framing of So Proudly We Hail! In “The Nurses of Bataan: Liberating Wartime Heroes from Melodrama,” Wieskamp argues that the nurses’ experiences provide “a model for reimagining heroism” as genderless, collective and healing, unlike the one on which melodrama is based. She challenges the strict melodramatic convention in which a strong, male hero working independently saves a damsel in distress from an evil villain, for its gendered caricatures fail to portray the realities of wartime nursing. Historical accounts, according to Wieskamp, document the nurses “not as heroes who banded together to survive, but as victims dependent upon men to rescue them from peril” in a melodramatic love story. 14
Writing about the strategic use of nineteenth-century American theatre to portray the country’s cultural identity in rhetoric, image and experience, John Mason explains that “Theatrical representation does not, of course, take place in a vacuum’, but ‘as part of the culture – itself an interactive process – to which it contributes.” According to Mason, melodrama polarizes its actors into binaries such as male and female, “and, most typically, good and evil,” making it easier to serve its purpose. “The absolute imperative of melodrama,” Mason continues, “is the restoration of the moral, social, and domestic order – and consequently, the reassurance of the audience – by subjecting its characters to a high degree of risk and uncertainty and then lifting them out of danger.” 15 By cultural convention, this representation denied women, depicted as damsels in distress, the right to act or choose for themselves. Like Wieskamp, Mason is interested in a culture’s “capacity for oblivious self-contradiction” seen in the simplicity with which it presented truth or myth as history. “In other words,” he concludes, “I perceive their apparently homogeneous construction as a mask conceived in response to the complexity it hides.” 16
In their discussion of So Proudly We Hail! Kalisch and Kalisch offer an example of this complexity in role reversals that defy the passivity attributed to damsels in distress when, once the nurses have been ordered to Corregidor in what was a hazardous journey, “the crucial moment of self-sacrifice is by a woman [Veronica Lake / D’Arcy character] for women.” And during their escape from Bataan, “the two female leads (Goddard and Colbert) take full responsibility for their respective mates” – not the other way around. 17 Wieskamp offers another complexity by reimagining heroism as a collective “healing heroism.” 18 In the melodramatic model, the heroes are the soldiers who stormed the gates of Santo Tomas to “rescue” the army and navy nurses, not the nurses who in real life worked collectively around the clock, facing incredible shortages of food and medical supplies, to provide life-saving care for the ailing prison camp internees – and before them, the sick and wounded soldiers on Bataan and Corregidor – with a quiet healing heroism.
That healing heroism was not limited to the nurses of Bataan and Corregidor. World War II military nurses overseas on land, sea and in the air found themselves in dangerous situations in North Africa, Normandy, Anzio and other war zones but ‘soldiered on’ to offer the same healing heroism to the sick and wounded in their care. Judith Bellafaire, writing for the U.S. Army Center of Military History, sums up that wartime nursing practice:
The Army nurse’s experience forced her to grow professionally and gave her the self-confidence and opportunity to pursue her career when she returned to the United States. She came home to a society that was ready to accept nurses as professional members of the United States health care system. World War II had forever changed the face of military nursing. 19
Brooks, writing about World War II British military nurses concurs: “The constantly shifting requirements of war nursing prevented Army nurses from remaining in a professional comfort zone of accepted roles and regime,” and nurses relished the opportunity to expand their work beyond the boundaries of “normal” pre-war nursing practice. But she adds a caveat: “Despite the increased confidence and autonomy in practice, the war was not the watershed for nursing that some have argued. Some of the extended, expanded and new work was, by the end of the war, enshrined into nursing practice; other work, however, was reclaimed by and returned to medicine.” 20 This reimagined role that nurses projected from the war zones did not fit society’s perceived image of the nurse on the home front. Like their predecessors from World War I, military nurses were expected to leave their expanded role “over there” and return to more traditional nursing practice. And as in onscreen melodrama, society was ready to restore its moral, social and domestic order; strong, independent women in battle fatigues who had experienced the war at the battlefront did not fit this postwar image.
Nurse uniforms are the topic of the next Blog.
To learn how the history of nursing was reflected on the opera stage, see Judith Barger, The Nurse in History and Opera: From Servant to Sister (Lexington Books, 2024).
Notes
1 Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction, 2nd ed. (New York and London: Routledge, 2003), 214; Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), 161, 256; see also E. [Ernest] T. Kirby, Ur-Drama: The Origins of Theatre (New York: New York University Press, 1975), 1–32.
2 Sharon Onevelo Watkinson, “All the World’s a Stage … Even for Nurses,” Image 14 (2) (June 1982): 48. The Shakespeare quotation is from As You Like It, Act 2, scene 7, spoken by Jacques, lines 139–43.
3 Colin Adrian Holmes, “The Drama of Nursing,” Journal of Advanced Nursing 17 (1992): 941.
4 Elizabeth Burns, Theatricality: A Study of Convention in the Theatre and in Social Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1972); Charles Horton Cooley, Human Nature and the Social Order (New York: Schocken, 1964), 183–85.
5 Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1959; Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 1973).
6 Glen McGillivray, “Theatricality: A Critical Genealogy,” Ph.D. thesis, The University of Sydney, 2004, 123–24.
7 See Burns, Theatricality, 230; and Richard Schechner, Performance Theory, rev. ed. (London: Routledge, 2003), 283.
8 Roberts, Debbie, and Richard Talbot. “Learning to Act Like a Nurse.” Paper 35. In Education in a Changing Environment [ECE] 6th International Conference: Creativity and Engagement in Higher Education, 6–8 July 2011, University of Salford, Greater Manchester, 2011.
9 Adam Blatner, “Role Playing in Education.” (Unpublished paper, 1995, rev. 2009), at https://www.blatner.com/adam/pdntbk/rlplayedu.htm.
10 Elizabeth M. Norman, We Band of Angels: The Untold Story of American Women Trapped on Bataan (New York: Pocket Books, 1999), 127, 129.
11 So Proudly We Hail!, Mark Sandrich Production, Universal Studios Paramount Picture, 1943. Quinine is an anti-malarial drug that was in short supply.
12 Valerie Wieskamp, “The Nurses of Bataan: Liberating Wartime Heroes from Melodrama,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 16 (1) (Spring 2013): 38.
13 Bosley Crother, “Misses Colbert, Goddard, Lake Seen in ‘So Proudly We Hail’ as Army Nurses Who Aid the Wounded Men on Bataan,” New York Times, 10 September 1943, 29. Two other war films with military or quasi-military nurse characters – Parachute Nurse, directed by Charles Barton, produced by Wallace MacDonald (Columbia Pictures, August 1942), and Cry Havoc directed by Richard Thorpe, produced by Edwin H. Knopf (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, November 1943) – were not as successful at the box office. I have not found a video of this film, but for more information, see “‘Parachute Nurse’ Timely; ‘Halfway to Shanghai’ Fair.” Hollywood Reporter 8 (September 1942): 4 and “Parachute Nurses?” RN 5 (February 1942): 17, 56, 58.
14 Wieskamp, “The Nurses of Bataan,” 32–33.
15 Jeffrey D. Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 4, 16, 19.
16 Mason, Melodrama and the Myth of America, 21–22.
17 Philip A. Kalisch and Beatrice J. Kalisch, The Changing Image of the Nurse (Menlo Park, CA: Addison-Wesley, 1987), 109.
18 Wieskamp, “The Nurses of Bataan,” 32–33.
19 Judith A. Bellafaire, “The Army Nurse Corps: A Commemoration of World War II Service,” (Washington, DC: U.S. Army Center of Military History, CMH Pub 72–14, no date), 31.
20 Jane Brooks, Negotiating Nursing: British Nursing Sisters and Soldiers in the Second World War (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018), 55, 156.
