About the Article
Published in:
Vol. 4, No. 1
Category:
Analyses
About the Author
Susan Anthony Salladay
Living on Borrowed Authority: Postmodernism and Methods of Presentation
Science and Postmodern Criticism
Healing Is Believing: Postmodernism Impacts Nursing
Abstract: Nursing’s most influential theorists of the decades from the 1950s through the 1980s paved the way for the profession’s almost universal acceptance of a postmodern worldview that radically alters nursing’s understandings of personhood, healing, and health care. No longer is the physician the healer, nor the nurse his handmaiden. Instead, the healer is the Self—the Divine within. Alternative therapies assist patients in accomplishing their own healing. The purpose and goal of the nurse is to provide physical, psychosocial, and spiritual care to empower patients to recover health through a variety of self-healing techniques involving direction and exchange of spiritual forces or energies. Nursing theory and practice reflect a postmodern worldview that contrasts with both the skepticism of modernism’s scientific rationalism and orthodox Christianity’s biblically based understandings of divine and human personhood, health and healing.
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