Abstract
Although we all recognize when we are being cared for or treated in a caring way, the term care is not easy to define. We feel that words comfort and care have slightly different meanings, yet their differences are not easy to pin down. To Dr. Janice Morse, a professor of nursing at the University of Alberta, these subtleties are important. She is conducting a major research project funded by the U.S. National Center for Nursing Research, NIH, to examine the concepts of comfort and caring in nursing. For her, an understanding of caring and comfort is important because care "is essential to keep families and societies and cultures and nations and human kind together," and because historically, care has been seen as the essence of nursing.
Since the early twentieth century, with the development of scientific medicine and a medical profession, the two functions of curing and caring were split. According to Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English in a book which summarizes the history of women healers, "Curing became the exclusive province of the doctor; caring was relegated to the nurse. All credit for the patient's recovery went to the doctor and his 'quick fix'. The nurse's activities, on the other hand, were barely distinguishable from those of a servant. She had no power, no magic, and no claim to the credit." Dr. Morse believes that nurses indeed deserve credit for the patient's recovery, and that one of their major contributions, that is, caring, is a necessary element in the curing process.