During a graduate seminar, students of nursing were able to talk freely about what could or would disgust them in the care they would give to bodies in the line of providing nursing care. In answering questions about what caused them to have averse feelings, they learned what might disturb, then where such feelings might come from and not that they were inappropriate or to be silenced. Such a process is a rare occurrence in a nursing course. Yet from the seeming chaos of war zones and emergency rooms to the ritualised order of forensic psychiatric settings and many other practice environments, nurses often experience feelings of disgust and repulsion in their practice. For these intense feelings to occur, an abject object must exist. Cadaverous, sick, disabled bodies, troubled minds, weeping wounds; products of bodies, such as vomit and faeces, are all part of nursing work and threaten the clean and proper bodies of nurses.
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