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Biography
• Born first of September of 1924 in Freeport, New York
• She was 5 years old at the time
• Spent her early school years during the depression of the 1930s
• Raised in the east coast where she earned a BScN
• Began her graduate work at Johns Hopkin University
• She was 15 years old when she started learning the role of a nurse as well as work
responsibilities during the time period of the later half of the 1930s. This was
when the Hoover Dam was completed, King Edward VIII abdicates the throne for a
divorcee from the United States, Amelia Earhardt vanished, the Hindenberg caught
fire, the Golden Gate Bridge was finished and opened for traffic, and Hitler
annexed Austria and the tension with the Nazi's and the Jewish population in
Germany was escalating
• She had graduated in August of 1945 with a diploma from Lenox Hill School of
Nursing in New York, within a year of WW2 ending
Biography
• During the time that she was in her first year of college, a great portion of the young men
had been deployed overseas both in Europe and the Pacific. Rationing of needed supplies for
the war effort was in full swing and more and more women moved out of homemaking and
into the workforce.
• The bombing of Pearl Harbor in December of 1941 shocked the nation, and have shaped, to
some extent, the views of Paterson during these formative years and must have had some
impact on her decision to go into the nursing profession
• Nine years later, Josephine Paterson graduated with her Bachelor's Degree in Nursing
Education from St. John's University in Brooklyn, New York
• After moving to Baltimore, Maryland she completed in June, a year later, with her Master's in
Public Health from the John Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health
• It was during the 1950's and 1960's that Paterson, and together with Loretta Zderad, did their
formative nursing work, the basis from which they would draw from in formulating their
Humanistic Nursing Theory and further refinement in the 70's and 80's. They were just young
adults during this time.
• Paterson worked in the public and mental health field and received her DNS in 1969 from
Boston University with her specialty of psychiatric mental health
• She presented and published most of her work with Zderad in the decades of the 1960's and
1970's
Relationship with Loretta Zderad
• They met in the 1950s while working at Catholic University,
where their task was to create a new program that would
include Psychiatric and Community Health components as
part of the graduate program
• Their friendship lasted over 35 years
• They shared experiences, ideas, and insights to form a
concept that evolved into the Formal Theory of Humanistic
Nursing
• They first published their book Humanistic Nursing in 1976
• Their initial commitment to creativity conceptualize nursing
constructs developed into "Nursology“,a phenomenolgical
approach to studying nursing as an existential experience
Humanistic Nursing Theory
• "multidimensional"
• "interactive theory"
• In this theory, the components identified as humans are the patient
(can refer to the person, family, community) and the nurse
• PERSON WHO SENDS CALL FOR HELP IS THE PATIENT
• PERSON WHO RECOGNIZES AND RESPONDS TO THE CALL IS THE
NURSE
• "Dialogue" which provides methodological bridge between theory
and practice
• nurturing of "wellbeing" and "morebeing"
• What happens during this dialogue, the "and" in the "call-and-
response", the between, is nursing.
PERSON