Abstract

This study explores the tradition of Virtue in nursing's narrative from the Nightingale era, when "good nurses were good women," until the 1980s when nurses are presented as patient advocates. Specifically the study is concerned with what an analysis of nursing practice--as that practice is presented in nursing literature over the last century--says about the concept of Virtue and the attendant applied virtues in nursing. As a retelling of nursing's story the study considers nursing's ideologies and images that inform and guide nursing practice. Virtue is understood, defined and explained against an account of nursing's social and moral life. ;Nursing, traditionally perceived as "women's work," presents many tensions, conflicts and constraints. There was and continues a dichotomy between the nurse's responsibility in an ethic of care and the nurse's right to define and control this care in a professional practice. The inherent human needs in illness, the nurse-patient relationship, and the moral nature of nursing, make the universalistic moral theories in the western tradition of principled, rule-bound ethics inadequate as the only perception of morality in nursing practice. The ethic of care has traditionally been an important moral perspective to nurses. ;The demands of contempory nursing practice on nursing's ethic of caring are unprecedented. Morality is however so much a part of nursing's life that it must have a bearing on nursing practice and nursing practice in turn must have a bearing on nursing ethics. This study explores that morality in the narrative of nursing