ABSTRACT
After providing an overview of postmodern and post-structural non-American nursing literature, this chapter illustrates two prominent examples of the application of Foucault’s ideas generated outside American nursing science and nursing theory. These examples of Foucauldian nursing scholarship by Carl May and Sioban Nelson draw on continental philosophical influences in the context of rigorous research traditions in sociology and history. These authors problematized a widely accepted holistic ideal as a superior ethical nursing stance and as a model of practice that valorizes “knowing the patient” as an egalitarian and self-evident configuration of the nurse–patient relationship. The cases discussed in this chapter opened new vistas for understanding nursing practice and nursing knowledge as socially and historically contingent phenomena.
