Nursing and Humanities

What this site is about

This site is about points of meeting between nursing and humanities. Nursing practice in all its diversity, nurse education, nursing research and the enormous richness of the humanities – art, literature, poetry, history, philosophy, drama, film, music…

My name is Graham McCaffrey and I am an Associate Professor of Nursing at the University of Calgary, Alberta, Canada (for more on my background, see the “How I got here…” link at the top of the page).

My starting point is that there has been – and continues to be – a long and productive relationship between nursing and humanities, but for various reasons it is a relationship that has not received the attention it deserves.

One of the reasons for setting up the site is that it is connected to a research project entitled Nursing and Humanities: An Evolving Relationship. The project is a study of nurses’ experiences of being influenced by and making use of arts and humanities in their work. Now I have a grant to support the project, and the study is under way, look out for periodic posts about what we are doing.

This project draws on research supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. 

In my book Nursing and Humanities I describe the relationship and go into the reasons why it has always remained half hidden.

https://www.routledge.com/Nursing-and-Humanities/McCaffrey/p/book/9780367347765

I have a chapter in the Routledge Handbook of Philosophy and Nursing edited by Martin Lipscomb that was published at the end of 2023. It is on the theme of arts and humanities in nursing, and why we should name humanities as the source(s) for vital strands of nursing knowledge.

https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Handbook-of-Philosophy-and-Nursing/Lipscomb/p/book/9781032114606