The proper object of nursing science

Abstract

We have inherited a notion of nursing science from the 19th century when authentic science came to be identified with the strict objectivity of classical physics. A clear cut distinction between the subject and the object is a prime condition for research, and all genuinely scientific knowledge must be verified by experimentation. It was during this period in the history of science that medicine developed into a science. The proper object of medical science is homo natura, man conceived of as one link in the chain of material beings subject to and determined by the laws of physical causality. When man is conceived thus, it is necessary to seek his determining causes, and experimentation is precisely the rigorous discovery of causal relationships. Nursing has appropriated the model of homo natura from medical science, about which we are asking our research questions and for whom we are conducting our practice. Paradoxically, the devotion of nursing research to the identification of a body-of-knowledge that is uniquely nursing is precisely leading us away from that knowledge. Nursing has borrowed the methods of the natural sciences which are only appropriate for the investigation of natural entities, and has imposed these methods upon a radically different content, namely man as human. The present criterion for research questions in nursing is whether or not the scientific method can be faithfully applied to the content to be investigated. But there is an apparent conflict between the dictates of science and the subject matter of nursing, what we have achieved thus far is a psychophysical parallelism which has