HUMANISTIC
NURSING THEORY

By:

MARY JOHN L. RENONG, RN
August 10, 2013

Dr. Loretta Zderad Dr. Josephine Paterson
I. BIOGRAPHY Josephine Paterson was born on the 1st of September of 1924 in Freeport, New York. Loretta and Josephine spent their early school years during the depression of the 1930's. Josephine G. Paterson was also learning the role of a nurse as well as work responsibilities during this same time period. She had graduated in August of 1945 with a diploma from Lenox Hill School of Nursing in New York. She finished a couple of years earlier than Loretta Zderad and within a year of WW II ending. Nine years later (1954, August) Josephine Paterson graduated
The progress of nursing as a human science is hampered by the mechanistic, deterministic, cause-and-effect methods that have dominated it; in other words, they rejected the received view, the logical positivist view of theory development (Paterson, 1971, p. 143). Paterson and Zderad were a decade ahead of the literature in nursing that later advocated such a move. They have also developed their ideas on the premise that the experiences of nurses in practice supply the impetus for any useful theory for nurses. However, they also warned us that preconceived notions influence what is significant and determinately affect the development of knowledge. Nursing is a lived dialogue that incorporates an inter-subjective transaction in which a nurse and a patient meet, relate, and are totally present in the experience in an existential way that includes intimacy and mutuality (Paterson and Zderad, 1970–1971). Nursing brings a person together with a nurse because of the call of that person for help and the response of the nurse. The encounter is influenced by all other human beings in the patient’s and nurse’s lives and by other things, whether ordinary objects (such as utensils, clothes, furniture) or special objects (such as life-sustaining equipment). The dialogue during these encounters occurs in a time frame as experienced by both partners. When