Dialogical Nursing: Art-Science
Art and science, like nursing, represent angular views. Each is a view with a particular purpose. They are human responses to the everyday world in which man lives. Existentially speaking, each is a form of living dialogue between man and his human situation.
It is possible that there is in nursing a kind of human response to reality that is a combination, a true synthesis of art and science? The more one focuses on nursing as it is lived, on the intersubjective transaction as it is experienced in the everyday world, the more questions arise about it as art and science. Elements of both art and science are evident in nursing. The practicing nurse must integrate them in her mode of being in the situation.
While Dr. Josephine Paterson was developing a methodology of inquiry from a clinical nursing process and describing her construct of the “all-at-once,” she was so intent on communicating the interrelated reality of the art and science elements in nursing, that she welded them together with a hyphen into one word, “art-science.” And even then there is some dissatisfaction when the weld is interpreted merely as a seam. For the combination is more than additive; it is a new synthetic whole.
I experienced a similar difficulty in trying to describe the synthesis of art and science that takes place in the nursing process. The nursing dialogue reflects the orientations of art and science for it involves both the patient’s and the nurse’s subjective and objective worlds. I believe the synthesis of art and science is lived by the nurse in the nursing act. This is a phenomenon more readily experienced than described.
Yet if we truly experience nursing as a kind of art-science, as a particular kind of flowing, synthesizing, subjective-objective intersubjective dialogue, then nursing offers a unique path to human knowledge and it is our responsibility to try to describe and share it.
Footnotes
[1] New England Council on Higher Education for Nursing, Humanities and the Arts as Bases for Nursing: Implications for Newer Dimensions in Generic Nursing Education, Proceedings of the Fifth Inter-University Work Conference (Lennox, Mass: New England Council on Higher Education for Nursing, June, 1968). “Humanities, Humaneness, Humanitarianism,” Editorial in Nursing Outlook, Vol. 18, No. 9 (September, 1970), p. 21. Charles E. Berry and E. J. Drummond, “The Place of the Humanities in Nursing Education,” Nursing Outlook, Vol. 18, No. 9 (September, 1970), pp. 30-31. Marion E. Kalkman, “The Role of the Humanities in Graduate Programs in Nursing,” in Doctoral Preparation for Nurses, ed. Esther A. Garrison (San Francisco: University of California, 1973), pp. 138-155.
[2] Mary Jane Trautman, “Nurses as Poets,” American Journal of Nursing, Vol. 71, No. 4 (April, 1971), p. 727.
[3] Ibid., p. 728.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Chaim Potok, My Name Is Asher Lev (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1972), p. 105.
[6] Grayce C. Scott Garner, “Qualitative and Quantitative Analyses of Schizophrenic Verbal and Non-Verbal Acts Related to Selected Kinds of Music,” Humanities and the Arts, p. 49.
[7] Carol Ann Christoffers, “Movigenic Nursing: An Expanded Dimension,” Humanities and the Arts, p. 95.
[8] Garner, p. 40.
[9] Picasso as quoted in My Name Is Asher Lev.
[10] John Hersey, The Conspiracy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1972), p. 82.
[11] Faye G. Abdellah, “The Nature of Nursing Science,” Nursing Research, Vol. XVIII (September-October, 1969), p. 393.
[12] “Art,” The Great Ideas: A Syntopicon of Great Books of the Western World I, Vol. 2, 1952, pp. 64-65.
[13] Ellen T. Fahy, “Nursing Process as a Performing Art,” Humanities and the Arts, p. 124.
[14] Martin Buber, I and Thou, 2nd ed., trans. Ronald Gregor Smith (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1958), p. 9.
9
A Heuristic Culmination
This chapter presents an application of the humanistic nursing practice theory over time and an outcome. The outcome represents my present conscious conceptualization of my personal theory of nursing. It has grown out of my nursing practice experience, my reflecting, relating, describing, and synthesizing. This is heuristic culmination of much mulling over my lived world of nursing.