In this episode, Ian passionately describes his reasoning behind the belief that Nursing Theory ought to backpeddle toward practitioners as the existential philosophical enterprise has it seemingly running toward extinction, as it leaps further and further away from what practitioners actually need or care about. Then he reads through 21 definitions of what Nursing is or consists of by the thought leaders of our field from Nightingale onward, save only a few, and discusses some of his agreements and contentions with these thinkers perspectives. Ultimately, as Dr. Rosemarie Rizzo Parse has written, previously, philosophical debate is at the heart of nursing, and it's time we infuse this conversation with some pushback that isn't the naivety of an undergraduate simply not wanting to complete their Nursing Theory paper, because it seems silly to them.
