Cover -- Nursing the images: Media, culture and professional identity -- Copyright -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- List of illustrations -- Illustration acknowledgements -- Introduction: (Auto)biography, research and feminist cultural studies -- 1. Images, identities and selves -- Images: nursing and femininity -- Identities: nurses and their professional image -- Selves: personal conceptions of professional identity -- 2. The popular imagination -- Reification and recruitment: images in post-war Britain -- Irreverence and romance: the 1950s and 1960s -- Fascination and aspiration: the romantic ideal -- Soap, sex and satire: the late 1960s and early 1970s -- 3. The professional imagination -- A divided identity -- Class divisions: job or profession? -- Gender divisions: men enter the picture -- Racial divisions: visible differences -- Image and identity: Briggs and the image of nursing -- 4. The personal imagination -- Self-image and uniform identities -- Knowing your place: hierarchy, status and the self -- Out of place: re-location, racism and the 'other' -- The 'proper nurse': self as image, image as self -- 5. The contemporary imagination -- Recruitment in crisis -- Romance in crisis -- Equal opportunities in crisis: medical drama -- Carry on caring -- Notes -- References and bibliography -- Index.