Art and science, like nursing, represent angular views. Each is a view
with a particular purpose. They are human responses to the everyday
world in which man lives. Existentially speaking, each is a form of
living dialogue between man and his human situation.
It is possible that there is in nursing a kind of human response to
reality that is a combination, a true synthesis of art and science? The
more one focuses on nursing as it is lived, on the intersubjective
transaction as it is experienced in the everyday world, the more
questions arise about it as art and science. Elements of both art and
science are evident in nursing. The practicing nurse must integrate them
in her mode of being in the situation.
While Dr. Josephine Paterson was developing a methodology of inquiry
from a clinical nursing process and describing her construct of the
"all-at-once," she was so intent on communicating the interrelated
reality of the art and science elements in nursing, that she welded them
together with a hyphen into one word, "art-science." And even then there
is some dissatisfaction when the weld is interpreted merely as a seam.
For the combination is more than additive; it is a new synthetic whole.
I experienced a similar difficulty in trying to describe the synthesis
of art and science that takes place in the nursing process. The nursing
dialogue reflects the orientations of art and science for it involves
both the patient's and the nurse's subjective and objective worlds. I
believe the synthesis of art and science is _lived_ by the nurse in the
nursing act. This is a phenomenon more readily experienced than
described.
Yet if we truly experience nursing as a kind of art-science, as a
particular kind of flowing, synthesizing, subjective-objective
intersubjective dialogue, then nursing offers a unique path to human
knowledge and it is our responsibility to try to describe and share it.