ABSTRACT
The classic generation of American nursing theorists published a series of texts during the 1970s which drew heavily on non-nursing sources, principally systems theory and humanistic psychology (Levine 1969, King 1971, Roy 1976, Watson 1979, Johnson 1980, Neuman 1982). Although these texts are now regarded as having developed ‘nursing conceptual models’ and ‘unique nursing theories’ (Villarruel et al. 2001), they set a precedent for importing ideas-with-currency from outside the discipline (Rogers and Maslow became well known during the 1960s; Bertalanffy’s work on general system theory appeared in English in 1969). The formal evidence is sparse, but the indications are that this precedent has been followed, despite caveats about the risks of ‘borrowed theory’. Spear’s (2007: E1) survey of 207 doctoral dissertations suggests that almost half of them ‘studied theories from fields other than nursing’.
