ABSTRACT
The development of modern nursing walks hand-in-hand with the development of nursing ethics, giving rise to an extraordinary body of literature, largely written by nurses for nurses. This includes approximately 100 textbooks and editions, and hundreds of journal articles. As the profession and its ethics take shape, it is profoundly affected by the social location of women, the first-wave feminism of early nursing leaders, social concerns of the Progressive Era, and related aspirations for the creation of a profession for women. These factors converge to shape the ethics of the profession ab initio as a distinctly social ethics. Yet 125 years later, nursing’s movement into the university, its embrace of bioethics, and its loss of nursing humanities have caused its social ethics to languish and its ethics to become stunted. The way forward is for nursing to embrace its own capacious ethics, while using the more constricted bioethics as adjunctive. Reclaiming the plucky tradition of nursing ethics would create for nursing a clearer and brighter future with a stronger vision of the good society, the good nurse, and good patient care, by addressing issues of the social construction of health/illness, and even how an individual person became your patient.
