Rising to "The Highest Morals"-The Rich History of Nursing Ethics.

ABSTRACT: Modern nursing is supported by a rich ethical tradition dating back to the mid-19th century. Moving illustrations of nursing practice and "the highest morals" (McIsaac, 1901) relay the distinguished history and distinctives of nursing ethics from the 1860s to the present day. Of note is that nursing ethics is relationally focused, virtue-based, preventative, and central to the identity of nursing. A brief history of how bioethics emerged in the mid-20th century and an overview of the development of nursing ethics unveils differences between the two ethical paradigms.

Evangelism in Patient Care: An Ethical Analysis.

Evangelism has been present in modern nursing care from the days of Nightingale in the Crimea. Even so, there is little in the way of ethical analysis and guidance regarding evangelism in healthcare. This article examines Nightingale's concern about evangelism in nursing care; discusses the boundaries established by the 2015 American Nurses Association Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements; and analyzes ethical issues including vocation, power, vulnerability and voluntariness, religious diversity, spiritual care, harm, and the Great Commission. Within the context of ethical analysis, broad guidelines are provided for nurses in clinical practice.

'Unladylike Commotion': Early feminism and nursing's role in gender/trans dialogue.

From nursing's history comes the impetus and grounding for our current voice in gender/trans dialogue. Modern nursing struggled its way into being against restrictive, unjust, and oppressive social structures. Many of the obstructions and constraints that nurses and nursing leaders faced were shared by the general populace of women, and yet nurses were different from other women. Nurses worked outside the home, caring for strangers, including unrelated men, in a period when women were otherwise confined to the home. Nurses fought for women's suffrage, for child labor laws, for the welfare of factory workers, for garment workers, for unionization, for vaccination, for housing reform, for the humane treatment of mentally ill persons, for access to birth control, for the amelioration of a panoramic terrain of terrible social injustices, and for the control of nursing education, registration, and practice. For 150 years, nursing has been intrinsically, practically, and politically feminist. The hard-fought gains would eventually position nursing in tension with emerging trans issues. And yet, its history is exactly what situates nursing for fruitful participation in the developing trans discourse and to address issues of transinvisibility and unjust social and health structures that impede dignified and respectful health care.

Why the history of nursing ethics matters.

Modern American nursing has an extensive ethical heritage literature that extends from the 1870s to 1965 when the American Nurses Association issued a policy paper that called for moving nursing education out of hospital diploma programs and into colleges and universities. One consequence of this move was the dispersion of nursing libraries and the loss of nursing ethics textbooks, as they were largely not brought over into the college libraries. In addition to approximately 100 nursing ethics textbooks, the nursing ethics heritage literature also includes hundreds of journal articles that are often made less accessible in modern databases that concentrate on the past 20 or 30 years. A second consequence of nursing's movement into colleges and universities is that ethics was no longer taught by nursing faculty, but becomes separated and placed as a discrete ethics (later bioethics) course in departments of philosophy or theology. These courses were medically identified and rarely incorporated authentic nursing content. This shift in nursing education occurs contemporaneously with the rise of the field of bioethics. Bioethics is rapidly embraced by nursing, and as it develops within nursing, it fails to incorporate the rich ethical heritage, history, and literature of nursing prior to the development of the field of bioethics. This creates a radical disjunction in nursing's ethics; a failure to more adequately explore the moral identity of nursing; the development of an ethics with a lack of fit with nursing's ethical history, literature, and theory; a neglect of nursing's ideal of service; a diminution of the scope and richness of nursing ethics as social ethics; and a loss of nursing ethical heritage of social justice activism and education. We must reclaim nursing's rich and capacious ethics heritage literature; the history of nursing ethics matters profoundly.

Faith and Ethics, Covenant and Code: The 2015 Revision of the ANA Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements.

How does and should the American Nurses Association Code of Ethics for Nurses with Interpretive Statements, with foundations from the late 1800s, impact today's nursing practice? How can the Code help you? The earlier 2001 Code was revised and became effective January 2015. The nine provisions received modest revision, as did the corresponding interpretive statements. However, Provisions 8 and 9 and their interpretive statements received more substantial revision. This article explains the Code and summarizes the 2015 revisions, considering points of particular interest for nurses of faith.

A very human being: Sister Marie Simone Roach, 1922-2016.

Sister (Sr.) Marie Simone Roach, of the Sisters of St. Martha of Antigonish, Nova Scotia, died at the Motherhouse on 2 July 2016 at the age of 93, leaving behind a rich legacy of theoretical and practical work in the areas of care, caring and nursing ethics. She was a humble soul whose deep and scholarly thinking thrust her onto the global nursing stage where she will forever be tied to a central concept in nursing, caring, through her Six Cs of Caring model. In Canada, she was the lead architect of the Canadian Nurses Association's first code of ethics, and her influence on revisions to it is still profound more than 35 years later. In this paper, four global scholars in nursing and ethics are invited to reflect on Sr. Simone's contribution to nursing and health-care, and we link her work to nursing and health-care going forward.

Heritage ethics: Toward a thicker account of nursing ethics.

The key to understanding the moral identity of modern nursing and the distinctiveness of nursing ethics resides in a deeper examination of the extensive nursing ethics literature and history from the late 1800s to the mid 1960s, that is, prior to the "bioethics revolution". There is a distinctive nursing ethics, but one that falls outside both biomedical and bioethics and is larger than either. Were, there a greater corpus of research on nursing's heritage ethics it would decidedly recondition the entire argument about a distinctive nursing ethics. It would also provide a thicker account of nursing ethics than has been afforded thus far. Such research is dependent upon identifying, locating, accessing and, more importantly, sharing these resources. A number of important heritage ethics sources are identified so that researchers might better locate them. In addition, a bibliography of heritage ethics textbooks and a transcript of the earliest known journal article on nursing ethics in the US are provided.