title: Heritage ethics: Toward a thicker account of nursing ethics.
abstract: The key to understanding the moral identity of modern nursing and the distinctiveness of nursing ethics resides in a deeper examination of the extensive nursing ethics literature and history from the late 1800s to the mid 1960s, that is, prior to the "bioethics revolution". There is a distinctive nursing ethics, but one that falls outside both biomedical and bioethics and is larger than either. Were, there a greater corpus of research on nursing's heritage ethics it would decidedly recondition the entire argument about a distinctive nursing ethics. It would also provide a thicker account of nursing ethics than has been afforded thus far. Such research is dependent upon identifying, locating, accessing and, more importantly, sharing these resources. A number of important heritage ethics sources are identified so that researchers might better locate them. In addition, a bibliography of heritage ethics textbooks and a transcript of the earliest known journal article on nursing ethics in the US are provided.
authors.affiliation: Azusa Pacific University, Azusa, California, USA mfowler@apu.edu.
authors.forename: Marsha D
authors.initials: MD
authors.lastname: Fowler
mesh_terms: D004993:Ethics, Nursing / Q000266:history*; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D006801:Humans
keywords: Heritage ethics; codes of ethics; historical resources; nursing ethical literature; nursing ethics; social ethics