The practice of the everyday in the literature of nursing.
If intense pain is "world-destroying," as Elaine Scarry has argued, one of the ways nurses respond to that loss is by re-enacting the commonplace-both in practice and in writing-through daily, accumulating acts of care. Such care poses a critique of medicine's emphasis on the exceptional moment and stresses forms of physical tending that are quotidian rather than heroic, ongoing rather than permanent or conclusive. I develop this view of care through the writings of nurses like Walt Whitman, Louisa May Alcott, Cortney Davis and Joyce Renwick.
Davis
Robert Leigh
RL
Department of English, Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH 45501, USA. rdavis@wittenberg.edu
D001154:Art; D006801:Humans; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D009732:Nursing Care; D014956:Writing