Abstract

FERNANDO DE SOUZA CAMPOS, Paulo  and  OGUISSO, Taka. Exclusion of black women: its representation shaping the professional nursing. Index Enferm [online]. 2006, vol.15, n.55, pp.26-30. ISSN 1699-5988.

This paper intends to reflect on the exclusion of black women from the origins of the Brazilian professional nursing. Based on cultural history, this study took for granted a recommendation to avoid black presence within the first official schools for nurses, which excluded black women, before the organization of the nursing education. However the historical memory of care brings up that black carers were looking after sick people. Such memories damaged the images of nursing professional identity, described essentially as practiced by white woman, daughter of the elite. This reflection allows us to suppose that representations of blacks in Brazil reiterated certain stereotypes which by its turn restrained black inclusions within modern nursing while images visibility from this process had projected them as morally unqualified, characterizing them as inappropriate to work for the art and science of care.