Analysis of the Person Concept in Nursing Theories

Abstract

The notion of the human as a person influences immediate action, which is especially evident in care during illness and suffering. Although medicine is as old as humanity, in the last two centuries it has developed within a bio–medical paradigm marked by positivism.
Since Florence Nightingale, nursing has been trying to develop within its own paradigm characterized by four concepts of which the person is central. It is only in the past half century that unique nursing theories have been developed in which the features of personalism can be discerned. The attempts by some theorists to define the concept of person have brought it closer to the classical definition of a person as found in philosophical anthropology.
The fact that there are theoretical models that direct practice from bio–medical to holistic and personalistic view speaks in favor of the maturing idea about the importance of observing man as a person with all the immediate positive effects of such a view.