around the globe. She was one of the first nurses to
articulate that nursing had a unique function yield-
ing a valuable contribution to the health care of in-
dividuals. In writing reflections on the nature of
nursing, Henderson (1966) states that her concept
of nursing anticipates universally available health
care and a partnership among doctors, nurses, and
other health-care workers.
Library Research and Development
Henderson has been heralded as the greatest advo-
cate for nursing libraries worldwide. Following the
completion of her revised text in 1955, Henderson
moved to Yale University. It was here that she began
what would become a distinguished career in li-
brary science research.
Of all her contributions to nursing, Virginia
Henderson’s work on the identification and control
of nursing literature is perhaps her greatest. In the
1950s there was an increasing interest on the part of
the profession to establish a research basis for the
nursing practice. It was also recognized that the
body of nursing knowledge was unstructured and
therefore inaccessible to practicing nurses and edu-
cators. Henderson encouraged nurses to become
active in the work of classifying nursing literature.
Virginia Henderson remained a strong advocate
for nursing resource development throughout her
lifetime. In 1990, the Sigma Theta Tau Interna-
tional Library was named in her honor. Henderson
insisted that if the library was to bear her name, the
electronic networking system would have to ad-
vance the work of staff nurses by providing them
with current, jargon-free information wherever
they were based (McBride, 1997).
Among other theorists featured in the section
II of this book, Wiedenbach, Henderson, and
Orlando introduced nursing theory to us in
the mid-twentieth century. Each of these
nurses looked at their nursing and explored
nurse-patient interactions using nursing
practice as the basis for their thought and for
their published scholarship. These nurse the-
orists defined the ways nursing is thought
about, practiced, and researched, both in the
U.S. and around the world. Perhaps most im-
portantly, each of these nurse theorists statedand responded to the question “What is nurs-
ing?” Their responses helped all who fol-
lowed to understand that the one nursed is
person, not object, and that the relationship
of nurse and patient is valuable to all.References
Barron, M. A. (1966). The effects varied nursing approaches
have on patients’ complaints of pain. Nursing Research, 15(1),
90–91.
Bochnak, M. A. (1963). The effect of an automatic and deliber-
ative process of nursing activity on the relief of patients’ pain:
A clinical experiment.Nursing Research, 12(3), 191–193.
Dickoff, J., James, P., & Wiedenbach, E. (1968). Theory in a prac-
tice discipline.Nursing Research, 14(5).
Dumas, R. G., & Leonard, R. C. (1963). The effect of nursing on
the incidence of post-operative vomiting.Nursing Research,
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Elms, R. R., & Leonard, R. C. (1966). The effects of nursing ap-
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Davis.CHAPTER 7 Twentieth-Century Nursing:Wiedenbach, Henderson, and Orlando’s Theories and Their Applications 77