Breaking-in bodies: teaching, nursing, initiations or what's love got to do with it?

Student nurses from universities are often ill-prepared for working with patients for whom they may feel disgust or discomfort. This paper discusses how students become able to work with those patients who are sick, dying and dead. It is a sustained engagement with the literature on abjection and disgust and is not the outcome of evaluation research. It considers the role of problem-based learning pedagogy in facilitating students' negotiation of their own discomfort and horror, and describes experiences which enable them to approach abject patients with more comfort and less disgust. The paper argues the importance of creating spaces where students can explore issues which are distressing and disturbing so that they will feel able to remain in nursing.