The Practical, Moral, and Personal Sense of Nursing

Download or read book The Practical, Moral, and Personal Sense of Nursing written by Anne H. Bishop and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 1990-07-05 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Practical, Moral, and Personal Sense of Nursing is the first explicitly philosophical articulation in English of the essence of nursing from a phenomenological perspective. The authors interpret nursing as competencies and excellences that are exercised in an “in-between” situation characteristic of nursing practice (the practical sense) which fosters the well-being of patients (the moral sense) within the nurse-patient relationship (the personal sense). This directly challenges the current tendency to reconstruct nursing by using theories drawn from the behavioral and natural sciences, and shows why nursing must be reformed from within. Bishop and Scudder stress the use of phenomenology to articulate an actual practice, showing the unique capacity of phenomenology to illuminate actual situations and to generate fresh understandings of old problems.