Authors

  1. Whitman, Brenda L. MSN, RN
  2. Rose, Wanda J. MSN, RN,C

Abstract

The authors describe an innovative teaching strategy using art to express personal philosophy of nursing. This teaching strategy gives students and faculty an opportunity to be creative and to express their personal feelings about the nature of nursing.

 

Nurses have been challenged, especially in this generation of high technology and economic strains, to acknowledge and reclaim the nursing legacy of the art of healing. 1 Florence Nightingale clearly saw nursing as an art: "Nursing is an art, and if it is to be made an art, it requires exclusive devotion as hard a preparation as any painter's or sculptor's work; for what is the having to do dead canvas or cold 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 the Fine Arts."2(68)