著者

宮脇 美保子

出版者

日本医学哲学・倫理学会

雑誌

医学哲学 医学倫理 (ISSN:02896427)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.19, pp.72-82, 2001-10-20 (Released:2018-02-01)

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Until recently, the western scientific methods have been viewed as the major and only valid and reliable ways to approach knowledge and understand people. Western science has developed a worldview which is in sharp contrast to that of the Far East. From the second half of the 17th to the end of the 19th century, the mechanistic Newtonian model of the universe dominated all scientific thought. Nature was viewed as not a mere machine, but in fact a very large machine. Such mechanistic philosophy was embodied in industrial society. However, the first three decades of the 20th century radically changed the whole situation in physics. At that time, Western science finally started to look to the eastern philosophies. In contrast to the mechanistic Western view, the eastern view of the world is organic. Incidentally, nursing science is a new intellectual activity. Established as recently as 50 years ago, it has occupied only a short span of time in the history of science. In the mid-1800s, Florence Nightingale called for nurses to develop an in-depth understanding of man and nature as interacting wholes. After one hundred years, Martha Rogers emerged as one of the most original thinkers in nursing. According to her "human beings are not disembodied entities, nor are they mechanical aggregates... human being is a unified whole possessing his/her own integrity and manifesting characteristics more than and different from the sum of its parts". Her model has had a significant influence on current scientific inquiry and professional nursing practice, including serving as a basis for the explication of other nursing theorists, including those of Newman, Parse, and Watson. Thus in the last part of the 20th century, the new world view has become more evident in nursing science.