ABSTRACT
Good nursing practice demands scientific knowledge and technical skills, and a capacity to respond with attention to the outlook and concerns of each individual person in need of care. This combination is often bundled up into the catch-all “art and science of nursing.” However, the “art” side of the formula has not been well defined. This chapter is an introduction to dimensions of how arts and humanities are necessary to fully understand and value the recognition of human experience that is so crucial to humane nursing practice. This chapter proceeds through a discussion of how arts and humanities can be applied in nursing, with examples from poetry; an analysis of how aesthetics has been considered in nursing literature which leads to the introduction of enactivist thinking as a model for how we might think about embodied, culturally situated care; arts and humanities in nursing research and education are described briefly; this chapter ends with a re-evaluation of the interdependence between art and science in nursing.
