[Fragments of nursing history: a knowledge created in the web of the theoretical submission process]

The purpose of this research is to rescue from the 1950s onwards, in the State of Rio Grande do Sul, both the discursive and non-discursive practices, on how the nursing teaching went on being redesigned, in search of a profession that would be more scientific, less technicistic, and how the nursing theories had had a participation in such process of transformations and contradictions. The survey has involved teaching nurses that had lived that period in history and, the discourse analysis was used for the documentary analysis. One of the analyses points out the importance of the nursing theories in the validation of the nurse's know-how between the 1950s and the 1980s.