<p>A Complete System of Nursing (Ashdown 1934) describes the strongly held view of the ‘good nurse’ as a capable, respectable, vocationally oriented and even-tempered woman. However, a feature of nursing is that it is associated with powerful and often contradictory discourses. Ashdown continues by describing nursing as ‘delicate’ and ‘refined’ work, but this belies the core functions of nursing, which entail close contact with the bodies of strangers, bodily excretions, illness, pain and death – usually private acts and described by Lawler and others as ‘dirty work’ (Lawler 1991). The moral and physical ambiguity implicit in nursing work is a major factor in trying to determine what it is that good nursing entails.</p>