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Aesthetics

"Nursing is an art: and if it is to be made an art, it requires an exclusive devotion as hard a preparation, as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do with dead canvas or dead marble, compared with having to do with the living body, the temple of God's spirit? It is one of the Fine Arts: I had almost said, the finest of Fine Arts."
                                                                                                                                                                                                                

Florence Nightingale

NURSING SITUATION: 

a shared lived experience in which the caring between nurse and nursed enhances personhood.

The concept of the nursing situation is central to all aspects of the Nursing As Caring theory.  It is through the study of nursing situations that the knowledge of nursing becomes known.  Aesthetic re-presentations of nursing situations are a creative artistic expression of the unity and fullness of nursing.  The world of aesthetics permits one to gain a different kind of understanding.  Aesthetics offer a way for nursing to be known, appreciated and studied.  Re-presentations—through the medium of story, poetry, music, dance sculpture and other forms of art—bring the experience of nursing alive for others to participate in.  These shared expressions of nursing as art encourage further study and advance the knowledge of nursing.  As nurses enter into the world of a shared nursing situation portrayed aesthetically, it lives anew...in its uniqueness and in its connectedness to all other nursing situations.

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