ABSTRACT
There are three important aspects of what nursing (and health care generally) has done in its discussions of hope. First, it has overlooked most of the uses of the word reviewed in Chapters 7–9, and drawn from a narrowly selective range. Second, it has grafted on to this narrow range a set of different anticipatory concepts such as optimism, goal-directedness and ambition. Third, it has appropriated the word ‘hope’ for new tasks. In health care, ‘hope’ has functions it doesn’t have in ordinary usage; in some instances, ordinary usage effectively disallows these new functions. This does not imply that its use in nursing is wrong. It is routine for technical disciplines to appropriate familiar words, ignore many of their everyday uses and give them new functions. Still, there might be a problem if you create a technical term without realising that this is what you’ve done, thinking that you have ‘clarified’ the concept. That is often the situation in health care. Sometimes, this lack of awareness has no practical consequences; but sometimes it has unfortunate methodological or clinical implications. This chapter elaborates these points, assessing the work of writers such as Dufault and Martocchio, Herth, Morse and Snyder.
