Nursing, Caring, and Complexity Science: For Human ... - Axon

Acknowledgments
The completion of this book was a labor of love. The work first was conceived
by Dr. Alice W. Davidson who, during the process of trying to achieve
the goal of advancing scholarship to integrate nursing and complexity sciences
for human–environment well-being, lost her life to cancer. As a coeditor
with Alice, after her death, Dr. Marian Turkel stepped to, and together
we have fulfilled Alice’s dream, the publication of this book. We learned that
the foundation of complexity sciences is to illuminate patterns of wholeness,
how all organisms are linked together coherently to reveal the artistic beauty
and harmony of the universe. We know too that nursing is unitary and holistic,
linked together in networks of relationship, principally the complex and
beautiful patterns of caring. We know by knowledge and experience that
the ways of being and knowing as caring in nursing through the quality of
the nurse–patient relationship facilitates healing, health, and well-being or
a peaceful death. Through the scholarship expressed in this book by examining
ideas advanced in the sciences of complexity, the science of unitary
human beings, caring in nursing education, research, leadership, and practice,
we recognize that the organic whole is not only diverse and unique
but also, dynamic and self-organizing. The unique expressions are caritas
processes, loving kindness, to use the words of Dr. Jean Watson. We are all
unique expressions of the mutual human-environment caring relationship.
The philosophies, theories, and scientific information expressed in this book
help us to understand, more than just in an intellectual way, how nursing,
health care, and the social world are continuously unfolding in tandem, continuously
emerging toward an authenticity of awareness of the meaning of
holism, a developing awareness that everything is a living relationship.
We would like to thank the following professionals who have made this
work possible:
n We are grateful to all the contributors to this book, our scientists, physicians,
administrators and nursing colleagues from many universities, hospitals
and military organizations who made this work a living treatise to
understanding patterns of wholeness for health, healing and well-being.
Our contributors are the finest scholars in their fields, and areas of scholarship
and practice.
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