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This text explores the significance of the nurse in mid-Victorian literary and social history. The author aims to show how the changing perceptions of the nurse during mid-Victorian times allow for insights into issues of class, gender, and race in the period. She shows how, from the early to mid-19th century, the nurse developed as a fulcrum for public perceptions regarding sex and class, consolidating for Victorian writers fundamental political and social anxieties - especially concerns over class conflict, public health, the "woman question", female heroics, and the construction of middle class sexuality. Icons such as Florence Nightingale are critically assessed as the constructed ideals of womanhood, service and war duty, and as related to popular notions concerning medicine, domestic ideology, and sexuality.