This work analyzes the way the body is built as an object of knowledge and intervention by the nurse who provides hospital care. Data was collected through field observations, handbook analysis, and nursing charts and records from 2000 to 2003. The analysis reveled that internment is traced from institutional logic, from medical professionals, and from knowledge built upon the subject. The exam gives visibility to medical power, investigates the body and objectifies the sick, subjecting him to the truths of a field of knowledge. Nursing care expresses itself in exercises of power, rituals, devices, symbolizations, and interest games that circle, conspire and support themselves in the hospital. Therefore the body produced is broken up with multiple domains, disciplined, watched; body taken by the illness. The hospital has revealed itself as a "constructed" body at the same time that it "constructs" bodies.
Nursing; Nursing care; Hospital care
