Abstract: I argue that because of the increase in physical labor for staff nurses, a definition of nursing professionalism should include the physical nature of nurses' work in which a nurse's goal is to 'get the work done.' I call this more inclusive conceptualization embodied professionalism, a hybrid of manual labor and high-level professionalism. The primary research question asks how the socio-spatial characteristics of three types of spaces in hospital nurses' workplace and nurses' experience of embodied professionalism shape one another? This is a qualitative case study, from a post-structuralist feminist perspective with a heterogeneous purposive sample of nine female nurses. This research was undertaken on a surgical unit at a regional hospital in Nova Scotia, Canada. The research methods were one-on-one structured interviews, two types of location mapping during the interviews, photo-documentation, architectural inventories, place-centered behavioral mapping, and focused observations. I also asked each participant to construct an experiential collage to visually represent the physical nature of her nursing work as it relates to time and space. The transformative conceptual framework that I developed explains embodied professionalism by illustrating how four dynamic components of nursing work experience interact with one another: body, space, people, and time. The caregiving activities of searching and moving are embedded within many caregiving activities and exemplify the physical nature of nursing work. Nurses are frequently searching for medications, supplies, and equipment. The nurses' approach to searching include having different types of searching travel plans, and making spatial decisions that are based on their spatial memory (multiple cognitive maps and an extensive cognitive inventory), patterns of activity, and rules of place. In addition to moving patients, nurses are frequently moving supplies, equipment, and patient furniture. The nurses' approach to moving includes teamwork among the staff and rearranging objects on the scale of the patient room and the scale of the unit. The resting activity of recovering such as breaks counters the physicality of searching and moving. The nurses' approach to recovering includes making decisions about the space they will use for recovering activities that are related to issues of surveillance, entitlement to space, and accessibility.