From Nursing Ethics; 1880s to the Present (p. 350)
Used by permission 2024 © Marsha Fowler
Chapter 11 Notes
Fowler, M. (2024). Nursing ethics, 1880s to the present: An archaeology of lost wisdom and identity. Taylor & Francis.
This book is a career-culminating work that necessarily comes at the end of my career, where the evolution of my thoughts can be seen, and at a time when I can now be embarrassed by what I wrote in my salad days, or perhaps last year. I had the great and wondrous opportunity to work with those nurses (and theolo- gians, philosophers, physicians, and attorneys) who were early into bioethics and its application to nursing and health policy. On the other hand, at the end of my career, I have also lost a number of those cherished colleagues, to eremitic retirement, frailty, death, or cognitive decline. I give particular mention to several of my ethics friends in Canada as well as Latin and South America who are missing from this chapter. In a sense, I waited too long, but could have done none other. All of the persons represented here have made distinctive contributions in different domains of nursing ethics and have thoughtful personal stories to tell. I had originally intended to intersperse these personal vignettes throughout the book, but came to the conclusion that they should be gathered into one chapter, even if a long chapter.
This chapter is a celebratory party of guests—the voices of 11 of my ethics friends and colleagues across the years. These are personal, not academic, reflections as the authors share the stories of their careers and passions for nursing and ethics as they entered the field of bioethics in the late 1960s and onward. These voices do represent some global spread, but not to the degree that I would have wished given the passage now of some 50 years. Most of these persons are at or beyond retirement age, so are able to look back across their lives and across the field of bioethics as it emerged. So as not to be directive, and to allow a maximum of freedom, the request to these persons was deliberately vague and open-ended. There is no attempt to homogenize their contributions, but rather to leave their voices as they are. To quote my rabbi friend, “May they be for you a blessing.”