| Sumario: | In 1939 the British journal, Nursing Mirror, launched a competition to find the "typical" nurse. Over the following weeks, hundreds of nurses submitted a portrait photograph to try and meet the journal's criteria. "This is not a beauty competition in the ordinary sense of the word." The editor stressed, "It is to find the typical nurse - the nurse whose features suggest not merely beauty of line, but professional capacity and human sympathy". Was it even possible to show these things in one simple photograph? The Nursing Mirror judges certainly thought so. The competition winners - and other entries published regularly during 1939 - provide an interesting lens through which to explore inter-war stereotypes of nursing in Britain. From this starting point on the eve of the Second World War, this article looks back through the complex - and often conflicting - representations of British nursing in the inter-war era, from the impact of the Nursing Registration Act of 1919 to the romanticised figure of Edith Cavell and the lingering spectre of the angelic Nightingale nurse. In what ways, it asks, did attitudes to gender and class influence representations of nursing; and how were these attitudes themselves changing during this period? Why was the visual image of the nurse so prominent in portrayals of nursing? And, perhaps most importantly of all, what value did these stereotypes of nursing have for those at the vanguard of a fledgling profession?.
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