Nursing: The Adult Patient 1966

"To the Student"

"To the Teacher"

individual

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INTERPERSONAL : SCIENCES

humanistic ----------------------------------------------- mechanistic

SOCIOLOGY : POLITICAL

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group - population

"The ways in which the nurse helps people are infinitely varied, and she is being called on constantly to exercise the very delicate judgment." p.xiii "Nurses respond to pressure in many different ways. Some withdraw, going as far from patients as possible. (They clean the medicine cabinet; it does not complain.) Some go about their work mechanically, refusing to get involved emotionally because involvement brings too much worry." p.xiv "The  particular aim of the authors of this book is to assist you in understanding and helping each individual patient for whom you care. ...

"For a particular patient at a particular time, one aspect of nursing care may outweigh all others in importance." "We believe that nurses need to develop a broad orientation to the care of patients, wherever the patient may be." p.xii "All divisions in the study of nursing are arbitrary. There is unity of nursing, regardless of whether it is practiced at home, in a hospital, in a jungle or a desert; whether the patient is a child or an adult; whether the illness is physical, mental, or both." p.xiii "Neither the "intercom" system nor the monitoring device that indicates the patients' vital signs was meant to supplant the nurse. ... In the future there will be more machines to perform mechanical tasks, but no machine can establish the creative, sustaining relationship with people that helps them to get well." p.xiv.

... Whatever their differences in social and economic background, temperament or relative state of health, your patients will have in common certain basic human requirements - skilled care, understanding and respect." p.xiii  "Some try old social skills in new situations. These may or may not be applicable. Social chit-chat may make the nurse feel at ease but may be one way to avoid learning abount the patients' needs. Some nurses manage t ofind a a formula that is exactly right for them. They become involved enough to be concerned about helping patients, while continuing to grow and learn." p.xiv

"The nursing situation today is far from ideal. Many nurses face a staggering workload - not only in relation to the number of patients for whom they are responsible but also because of the greater responsibility that is being delegated to them as advances are made in medical science." p.xiv. "Chapters on disaster nursing and world health problems have been included in the conviction that the profession of nursing has an important role to play during any disaster." p.x-xi

There is a definition of 'health' in this book (p.53), but no specific reference to nursing theory or models of nursing. Reading the references, the definition of health is neither derived from nursing or a WHO source. The definition does refer to health being more than the absence of illness.

Addressing acute contemporary issues, Chapter 59 'Nursing in Accident Disaster' includes Nuclear Disaster pp.1103-1114; while Chapter 60 on 'World Health Problems' is more comprehensive than I expected in such a book and at this time. Although the Cuban missile crisis was only fours years prior to publication.

Smith, D. W., & Gips, C. D. (1966). Care of the adult patient: Medical-surgical nursing. Philadelphia: Lippincott.