The characters on film and TV are often stereotypes, but the internet allows nurses to reshape their public image, writes David Stanley

How the public view nursing and nurses is both reflected in and influenced by the way they are portrayed in feature films, on TV and in other media. Nurses on screen are variously doctor's handmaidens, sex objects, romantic fools, self-sacrificing angels, or demoniacal, crazed or malicious villains. The most popular stereotypes in feature films with prominent nursing characters are the self-sacrificing angel, the object of sexual desire or the flirtatious vixen. Films such as Nurse Marjorie (1920), Dawn (1928), The Lamp Still Burns (1943), Operation Pacific (1951), Women of Valour (1986),...