In the publication, Celebrating Nurses: A Visual History, author Dr Christine Hallet provides a beautifully written history of nursing with pictures depicting our profession since inception. For today’s reflection about joy in our practice, I am sharing several particularly poignant passages which I believe capture perfectly the work that we do.
Nursing work is, by its very nature, heroic. It is not possible to be an effective nurse without engaging with the physical damage and emotional distress of patients. The ability to be engaged without being destroyed is the most extraordinary element of nursing expertise; it is also the least visible and the least appreciated. Through the millennia of experience, nurses working with suffering and vulnerable people have handed down from expert to novice, their understanding of how to offer real help to patients without themselves succumbing to despair: that is their art.
Nurses draw their family a large circle. The art of nursing is “care of strangers”. Its practitioners perform work that is beyond the capacity of informal caregivers- family and friends. Nurses are, as Patricia Donahue said, among the greatest artists the world has ever known; yet the performance of their art takes place in secret, and the majority of us know little about it.
Have a joyful day!
Carol