This literature review deals with curricular supervisioned traineeship in the nursing undergraduate program, whose objectives were to understand how the program is currently structured and to identify today's challenges, by tracing back its history and understanding the laws governing the program. Issues of Revista Brasileira de Enfermagem published between 1954 and 2006 were used as a main source. The study revealed that this academic activity has gone through several transformations since it was first structured in 1972, at a time when nursing was carried out from a biologicist and hospital-centered perspective. After 1994, it sought to have a structure based on the integrality and articulation between theory and practice, and teaching and service, with a view to the construction of the Brazilian public health system - SUS; a process that was enhanced in 2001 upon the implementation of the Brazilian Education Guidelines.
Clinical clerkship; Education; nursing; Curriculum; History of nursing