Making Empathy with Noses. Emotions and Senses in Nursing Personnel.

In this paper, I am interested in showing the meaning of empathy as a bodily, emotional, and sensory practice. I recover the idea of empathy from the first woman sociologist, Harriet Martineau, for whom empathy is both an epistemic and methodological resource for social research. At the same time, for Martineau, empathy is described by sensory metaphors such as the fact that a researcher who lacks empathy cannot understand a scene in its entirety and acts ‘like one who, without hearing the music, sees a room full of people begin to dance.’ In this sense, the aim of this paper is to reflect on the caring practices and empathy of nursing staff in a public hospital in Mexico City. We collect the findings of a sensory workshop applied in a public hospital that I designed and titled ‘Making empathy through smell’ in the framework of the ‘Commemoration of the International Nurses’ Day’ on 09 May 2024. Thirty-nine female nurses and eight male nurses participated. Among the participants, ten female nurses elaborated a visual and written narrative associated with their patient care practices, focusing on the idea of empathy as an act of bodily accompaniment related to the unpleasant tolerance of sick bodies. Emphasis will be placed on what nurses experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic and what they experience daily in caring for sick bodies. The nurses highlighted the somatic and emotional work (Vannini, 2012 et.al.) they do daily in relation to the unpleasant body odors of sick people. In other words, for them, understanding the sick person’s situation and tolerating emotions such as disgust and dislike of bad smells becomes part of the somatic and emotional work of their care practices.