The Nurse and the Rural World: A Successful Relation for Biomedicine
The Nurse and the Rural World: A Successful Relation for Biomedicine

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to bring into light the relation between some of the actors involved in the process of healing in rural areas based on the duality patient-healer. It has been more than one hundred years since the first healthcare law was passed (1874) and the progress of biomedicine has been quite obvious, even though it has lagged behind that of Western Europe. My main interest within this topic was to see what it was that made this system work. In a few previous articles I focused on the problems that the implementation of biomedicine in the Romanian rural areas had during the second half of the 20th century, particularly on why and how the system was rejected. With this article I focused on the reverse—what was it that made the biomedical system work? Consequently, I would bring forward a hypothesis on one of the key elements that led to the acceptance of the biomedical system in the rural areas. The idea emerged from the interpretation of the results of a few sessions of interviews done in the rural area of Transylvania, in 2009, 2010, and 2014. People of both sexes were interviewed and there was no age limit. The villages were situated at a variable distance from Cluj-Napoca—an important biomedical center. The results were convergent for all the studied villages, meaning that for our purposes physical distance could be discounted as a variable. One outcome, beside the others already approached in the previous articles—rejection of biomedicine, persistence of pre-modern healing systems, etc.—was that the role of the nurse was crucial in the acceptance of the biomedical system. Even though they hold a secondary place in the biomedical system, the main character being the physician, the nurses have played the major role of actually connecting the patients to biomedicine, thus building a core of trust which lay at the foundation of this relation.

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