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قراءة كتاب Humanistic Nursing

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Humanistic Nursing

Humanistic Nursing

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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for us, we and our professional nursing staff students have learned and become more human, more questioning, more clinical, and just, more.

We value our moreness. Appreciating and valuing the effects of our actualizing selves as human beings, we must attest to our existential modes of nurse being; our inner mandate is: share. Hence, Humanistic Nursing has come into being.

To find the meaning of nursing we have returned "to the thing itself," to the phenomenon of nursing as it occurs in the everyday world. Our reflections on nursing as a lived experience flowed into the realm of metanursing. Obviously, these thoughts are only a beginning. They are offered in the hope of stimulating response and further development. Dialogue may be difficult at first because humanistic nursing represents one of our discipline's less articulated streams. Yet, it is a stream traceable to nursing's foundation and, as such, is related to nursing's artistic, scientific, and technological currents. It is not being, cannot be, developed in opposition to them.

Science and art are forms of human responses to the human situation. They are valued in genuine humanism. Thus, the humanistic nursing approach does not reject advances in nursing technology, but rather it tries to increase their value by viewing their use within the perspective of the development of human potential. The same holds true for scientific, artistic, and clinical developments in nursing practice. They are the necessary means through which and in which humanistic nursing (a being and doing) is experienced and developed.

At this time when serious concern is being expressed about the survival of nursing as a profession, humanistic nursing offers a note of optimism. By examining the values underlying practice, it focuses on the meaning and means of nursing's particular' mode of interhuman caring. It increases respect for that caring as a means of human development. Nurses have the privilege of being with persons who are experiencing all the varied meanings of incarnate being with men and things in time and space in the entire range from birth to death. They not only have the opportunity to co-experience and co-search with patients the meaning of life, suffering, and death, but in the process they may become and help others become more-more human.

Beyond this, the humanistic nursing approach respects nursing experience as a source of wisdom. By describing and conceptualizing the phenomena experienced in nursing situations, nurses could contribute to the development of nursing as a discipline. Even more, they could add to the knowledge of man.

Humanistic nursing, then, is neither a break with nor a repetition of nursing's past. It is neither a rejection of nor a satisfaction with nursing's present. Rather it is an awakening to the possibilities of shaping our nursing world here and now and for the future.

Thanks to Miss Marguerite L. Burt are in order for she provoked our conceptualizations of our lived nursing worlds. Dr. Frederick H. Wescoe, while Chief of Nursing Service, Northport, N.Y., VAH administratively facilitated the time and the means for our compiling these materials into a manuscript. Past nursing students challenged and grappled with our ideas and theirs insisting always on our forwarding our thinking. Our consultants, Miss Lilyan Weymouth and Miss Rose Godbout, were marvelous resources and counselors.

Immediately we are most grateful to the participants in the six humanistic nursing courses taught here at the Northport VAH. As nurses, they received and accepted our expressed ideas to the extent of testing them in the fires of their real lived nursing practice settings. While struggling with our ideas and us, they gave to us. They were supportive, loving, and truly present with us in the community of nurses at Northport, VAH. Miss Sue McCann, clinical nurse specialist, one of our first course participants, has read and reviewed our materials. More than this Miss McCann has been a counselor, resource person, and a dependable friend in our humanistic nursing effort of the last three years. We hope our chapters give back to others, at least just a part of what we have received from them in our travels in the nursing world.

J.G.P L.T.Z.

[Transcriber's Note: to the 1988 Edition

Italic text has been marked as text.
Bold text has been marked as ~text~.
Obvious punctuation errors in the original have been corrected.
Other corrections are noted at the end of the text.
The original page numbers have been retained, e.g. {1} marks the start
of page 1 in the original text.]

HUMANISTIC NURSING

Josephine G. Paterson, DNSc, RN Loretta T. Zderad, PhD, RN

PREFACE

    Somewhere there's a child a crying
    Somewhere there's a child a crying
    Somewhere there's a child a crying
    Crying for freedom in South Africa.[1]

But until someone hears the cry and responds, the child will continue to suffer the oppression of the current South African regime; and the world will continue to be less than it could be. To cry aloud when there seems no chance of being heard, belies a hope—perhaps an inherently human trait—that someone, somewhere, somehow will hear that cry and respond to it.

This same hope, that someone would hear and respond, allowed existential psychologist Viktor Frankl to survive the systematic torture and degradation in Nazi death camps. As Frankl and others sought their way, they found meaning and salvation "through love and in love;" and by choosing to believe that "life still waited for him, that a human being waited for his return."[2]

There is power in the call of one person and the potential response of another; and incredible power when the potential response becomes real. There is the power for each person to change as she becomes more than she was before the dialogue. There is the power to transcend the situation as two people engage the events that are whirling around them and together try to make sense of their worlds and find a meaning to their existence. When the call and response between two people is as honest as it can be, there is the revolutionary power which the poet Muriel Rukeyser speaks of:

    What would happen if one woman told the truth about her life?
      The world would split open.[3]

{iv}

The call and response of an authentic dialogue between a nurse and patient has great power—the power to change the lived experiences of both patient and nurse, to change the situation, to change the world. It is the same authenticity we search for in relationships with our friends and lovers. The person who really listens to what we are saying, who really tries to understand our lived experiences of the world and who asks the same from us. When found, it brings the same exhilarating feeling of self-affirmation and the comforting feeling of well-being.

For, if as holistic beings we are the implicate order explicating itself, as suggested by Bohm[4] and Newman[5] among others, then the responsibilities of those who would help (e.g., nurses) include making sense out of the chaos that can occur as illness disrupts past order and as the ever-present threat of non-being disrupts all order. When we are successful in helping patients and their loved ones make sense of their lives by bringing meaning to them, we make sense of and bring meaning to our own.

And when we help create meaning, it is easier to remember why we chose nursing and why we continue to choose it despite what an underpaid and undervalued job it has become in today's marketplace. These are the moments when by a look or a

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