The practice of the everyday in the literature of nursing

Journal of Medical Humanities

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2005, Pages 7-21

  Davis, Robert Leigh ^a  

^a WITTENBERG UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

Care; Nursing; The everyday

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; HEALTH CARE DELIVERY; HEALTH CARE QUALITY; HUMAN; MEDICAL PRACTICE; NURSE; NURSE ATTITUDE; NURSE PATIENT RELATIONSHIP; NURSING; NURSING EDUCATION; PATIENT CARE; ART; NURSING CARE; WRITING;

ART; HUMANS; NURSE-PATIENT RELATIONS; NURSING CARE; WRITING;

EID: 20144378136     PISSN: 10413545     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/s10912-005-1049-9     Document Type: Article

References (45)

1. Walt Whitman, Specimen Days, in Walt Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, ed. Justin Kaplan (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1982), 726, 750.
2. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 31-32.
3. Ibid., 29.
4. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1980), 15.
5. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 80.
6. Lynn Payer stresses the emphasis in American medicine on aggressive therapy, specialized procedure and acute care. See her Medicine and Culture: Varieties of Treatment in the United States, England, West Germany, and France (New York: Henry Holt, 1988), 124-152.
7. Cortney Davis, "Creating a Sacred Space," in Between the Heartbeats: Poetry and Prose by Nurses, eds. Cortney Davis and Judy Schaefer (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 212. Subsequent references to works from Between the Heartbeats are cited in the text by page number.
8. Patricia Fumerton, "Introduction: A New New Historicism," in Renaissance Culture and the Everyday, eds. Patricia Fumerton and Simon Hunt (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), 4.
9. Summarizing changes in literary and cultural studies since the new historicism of the 1980s, Fumerton calls attention to the increasing importance of the common, the local, and the everyday as subjects of study. Foundational studies of the everyday include Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984);
10. Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life, trans. John Moore (New York: Verso, 1991);
11. and John Fiske, "Cultural Studies and the Culture of Everyday Life," in Cultural Studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler (New York: Routledge, 1992), 154-73.
12. Louisa May Alcott, Hospital Sketches, in Alternative Alcott, ed. Elaine Showalter (New Brunswick, N. J.: Rutgers University Press, 1988), 48.
13. For an account of "damaged social space" in American literature, see Philip Fisher, "Democratic Social Space: Whitman, Melville, and the Promise of American Transparency," in The New American Studies: Essays From "Representations," ed. Philip Fisher (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), 70-111.
14. Hollis Sigler, Hollis Sigler's Breast Cancer Journal (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1999), 36, 39, 49, 52, 60.
15. Ibid., 52.
16. Scarry, The Body in Pain, 45.
17. See Breast Cancer Journal, 41, 43, 56, 58, 60, 62, and 79.
18. Ibid., 48.
19. Quoted in Scarry, The Body in Pain, 32.
20. Judy Schaefer, Harvesting the Dew (Long Branch, N. J.: Vista Publishing, 1997), 26.
21. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 78.
22. Ibid., 94.
23. Ibid., 94.
24. Cortney Davis, Details of Flesh (Corvallis, OR.: Calyx Books, 1997), 71.
25. Cortney Davis, "Poetry About Patients: Hearing the Nurse's Voice," Journal of Medical Humanities 18, no. 2 (1997): 118.
26. See for instance, Davis' poem, "The Body Flute" (56-58). For an account of subjectivity and touch in a theory of nursing care
27. see Sally A. Gadow, "Nurse and Patient: The Caring Relationship," in Caring, Curing, Coping: Nurse, Physician, Patient Relationships, eds. Anne H. Bishop and John R. Scudder, Jr. (University, AL.: University of Alabama Press, 1985), 39-43.
28. Quoted in Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 123.
29. See Annette Kolodny, "Dancing Through the Minefield: Some Observations on the Theory, Practice, and Politics of a Feminist Literary Criticism," in Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, eds. Robyn R.Warhol and Diane Price Herndl (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 171-90.
30. Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 94.
31. See Brown, A Sense of Things, 7, 125.
32. Schaefer, Harvesting the Dew, 26.
33. See Michel Foucault, The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Vintage Books, 1975), 6.
34. For a discussion of the intimate interiority of objects, see Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), 78.
35. For an account of the politics of Whitman's nursing based on this notion of provisionality, see my Whitman and the Romance of Medicine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 20, 23-33.
36. Robinson, Housekeeping, 24-5.
37. Ibid., 25.
38. For an account of housekeeping as a metaphor for art in American literature, see Joan Kirkby, "Is There Life After Art? The Metaphysics of Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping," Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature 5, no. 1 (Spring 1986): 91-109. I'm drawing on Kirkby's insight into Dilsey's housekeeping in The Sound and the Fury, 95.
39. Commenting on Heidegger's essay, "The Thing," Stanley Cavel describes the "loss of connection, or rather our unconnectedness, with things, with the thing, das Ding, our being unbethinged, unbedingt, which is German for unconditioned (hence inhuman, monstrous, figures of a horror story)." See his In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 176.
40. In an unpublished essay, "The Non-Abandonment of Persons: An Account of Hospice Work," Sharon Cameron quotes this phase from the hospice statement of philosophy at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx.
41. Whitman, "I Sing the Body Electric," in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 257.
42. Whitman, "Song of Myself," in Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 224.
43. Margaret Edson, Wit (New York: Faber, 1999), 64-69.
44. See for instance, Carolyn Barbier's "Nighthawks" or Jeanne Beall's "Angel from Pratt Street" (1-14, 16).
45. I want to express my gratitude to Anne Hunsaker Hawkins and Susan Squier, co-directors of the NEH Institute at Hershey, for their encouragement and support in the process of writing this essay.