ABSTRACT
From the 1880s to 1965, the nursing ethics literature includes hundreds of journal articles, columns, commencement addresses, ICN speeches, codes of ethics, pledges, textbooks, and more. And yet it is a largely unexplored, even untouched, literature. In some cases, it is simply dismissed as “primarily feminine etiquette.” That is a deeply mistaken appraisal, for it is a sturdy, philosophically informed literature communicated through the nursing tradition, narrative, and experience. The majority of the almost 100 textbooks and editions devoted to nursing ethics are written by nurses for nurses, though some were written by non-nurses for nurses, all but one of whom were men. For our purposes here, nursing ethics refers to books on ethics by nurses for nurses. This chapter examines the nature, character, and content of the nursing ethics textbooks written by their nurse and non-nurse authors.
