man. He was often ill and frequently hospitalized
with gastrointestinal problems. She thinks that this
might have been why she had such a great interest
in nursing. Levine’s mother was a strong woman
who kept the home filled with love and warmth.
She was very supportive of Levine’s choice to be a
nurse. “[My mother] probably knew as much about
nursing as I did” (Levine, 1988b) because she was
devoted to caring for her father when he was ill.
Levine began attending the University of
Chicago but chose to attend Cook County School
of Nursing when she could no longer afford the
university. Being in nursing school was a new expe-
rience for her; she called it a “great adventure”
(Levine, 1988b). She received her diploma from
Cook County in 1944. She later received her bach-
elor of science degree from the University of
Chicago in 1949 and her master of science in nurs-
ing from Wayne State University in 1962.
Aside from her husband and children, education
was Levine’s primary interest, although she had
clinical experience in the operating room and in
oncology nursing. She was a civilian nurse at the
Gardiner General Hospital, director of nursing at
Drexel Home in Chicago, clinical instructor at
Bryan Memorial Hospital in Lincoln, Nebraska,
and administrative supervisor at University of
Chicago Clinics and Henry Ford Hospital in
Michigan. She was chairperson of clinical nursing
at Cook County School of Nursing and a faculty
member at Loyola University, Rush University, and
University of Illinois. She was a visiting professor
at Tel Aviv University in Israel and Recanti School
of Nursing at Ben Gurion University of the Negev
in Beer Sheeva, Israel. She was professor emeritus
in Medical Surgical Nursing, University of Chicago,
a charter fellow of the American Association of
Nurses (FAAN), and a member of Sigma Theta
Tau International, from which she received the
Elizabeth Russell Belford Award as distinguished
educator. She received an honorary doctorate from
Loyola University in 1992.
Introducing the Theory
F. A. Davis Company published the first edition of
Myra Levine’s textbook Introduction to Clinical
Nursingin 1969 and the second and last editions in
- In discussing the first edition of her book,
Levine (1969a, p. 39) said: “I decided against using
‘holistic’ in favor of ‘organismic,’ largely because the
term ‘holistic’ had been appropriated by pseudosci-
entists endowing it with the mythology of tran-
scendentalism. I used ‘holism’ in the second edition
in 1973 because I realized it was too important to
be abandoned to the mystics. I believed that it was
the proper description of the way the internal envi-
ronment and the external environment were joined
in the real world.” In the introduction to the second
edition, she wrote:
There is something very final about a printed page,
and yet books do have a life all their own. They gather
life from the use to which they are put, and when they
succeed in communicating among many individuals
in many places, then their intent is most truly served.
The most remarkable fact about the first edition of
this book has been the exchange of interests that has
resulted from the willingness with which its readers
and users have communicated with its author.
(Levine, 1973, p. vii)
This passage suggests that Levine’s original book
(1969b) provided a model to teach medical surgical
nursing and created a dialogue among colleagues
about the plan itself. The text has continued to cre-
ate dialogue about the art and science of nursing
with ongoing research serving as a testament to its
value (Delmore, 2003; Mefford, 1999).FOUNDATIONS OF CLINICAL NURSING
Levine’s original reason for writing the book was to
find a way to teach the foundations of nursing that
would focus on nursing and was organized in such
a way that nursing students would learn the skill as
well as the rationale for the skill. She felt that too
often the focus was on skill and not on the reasons
why the skill is performed. She felt that nursing
research was generally ignored. Her intent was to
bring practice and research together to establish
nursing as an applied science. The book was used as
a beginning nursing text by Levine and many of her
colleagues.
The first chapter of her text was entitled,
“Introduction to Patient Centered Nursing Care,” a
model of care delivery that is now acclaimed to be
the answer to cost-effective delivery of health-care
services today. She believed that patient-centered
care was “individualized nursing care” (Levine,
1973, p. 23). She discussed the theory of causation,CHAPTER 9 Myra Levine’s Conservation Model and Its Applications 95