ABSTRACT
Nursing ethics, prior to nursing’s colonization by bioethics, bears little resemblance to bioethics. Early nursing ethics is nurse-centric, relationally based, virtue-based, addresses nurses’ ethical comportment in all roles, is preventive in nature, incorporates nursing notions of the good, advances the social ethics of nursing, and sets forth ethical expectations for the profession as a whole. The subject of this chapter is this first wave of US nursing ethics to the rise of bioethics, that is distinctive and differs significantly from contemporary bioethics, yet it remains largely unknown or dismissed, and glaringly under-researched. Nursing has lost sight of its living tradition of collective ethical wisdom and ethical identity, one that crafted an ethics that would and could sustain nursing practice, even today. It offers nurses a wise, nursing-focused, comprehensive, generous, and learned ethics that deserves to be reclaimed and renewed for today’s nursing practice.
