title: The practice of the everyday in the literature of nursing.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Department of English, Wittenberg University, Springfield, OH 45501, USA. rdavis@wittenberg.edu
authors.forename: Robert Leigh
authors.initials: RL
authors.lastname: Davis
mesh_terms: D001154:Art; D006801:Humans; D009723:Nurse-Patient Relations; D009732:Nursing Care; D014956:Writing