Humanistic Nursing, page 19 by Josephine Paterson
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it within these specialty contexts--for example, pediatric, medical, rehabilitation, intensive care, long-term care, community. There seems to be no end to the proliferation of diversifications. Even the attempts of practitioners to combine specialties give rise to new specialties, such as, community mental health nursing and child psychiatric nursing.
So it is difficult to focus on the phenomenon of nursing as an entity without having one's view colored by a particular clinical, functional, or societal context. Yet, if we can "bracket" (hold in abeyance) these adjectival labels and the preconceived viewpoints they signify, we can consider the thing itself, the act of nursing in its most simple and general appearance. {12}
Well-Being and More-Being
In this most basic sense, then, disregarding the particular specialized forms in which it appears, the nursing act always is related to the health-illness quality of the human condition, or fundamentally, to a man's personal survival. This is not to say that all instances of nursing are matters of life and death, but rather that every nursing act has to do with the quality of a person's living and dying.
That nursing is related to health and illness is self-evident. How it is related is not so apparent. "Health" is valued as necessary for survival and is often proposed as the goal of nursing. There are, in actuality, many instances of nursing that could be described as "health restoring," "health sustaining," or "health promoting." Nurses engage in "health teaching" and "health supervision." On the other hand, there are instances in which health, taken in its narrowest meaning as freedom from disease, is not seen as an attainable goal, as evidenced, for example, in labels given to patients such as "terminal," "hopeless," and "chronic." Yet in actual practice these humans' conditions call forth some of the most complete, expert, total, beautiful nursing care. Nursing, then, as a human response, implies the valuing of some human potential