Scholarly Dialogue Jacqueline Fawcett, Contributing Editor The Nurse Theorists:

This edited transcript of an interview with JeanWatson presentsWatson’s recent thoughts about the current state of the discipline of nursing and the emergence of new perspectives; the contributions of her theory of human caring; and her otherwork on the advancement of the discipline of nursing, complementary and alternative therapies, nurs-ing research, and nursing education. Jean Watson had planned to write a book about an inte-grated curriculum for a baccalaureate curriculum in nursing. Instead, she developed a novel structure for basic nursing pro-cesses, whichwas published in the bookNursing: ThePhilos-ophy and Science of Caring (Watson, 1979). The work presented in that book solved someofWatson’s conceptual and empirical problems about nursing and formed the foundation for the science and art of human caring. Many years later, Watson (1997) explained that her 1979 book was published before there was any formal movement in nursing related to nursing theory per se. It emerged frommy quest to bring new meaning and dignity to the world of nursing and patient care—care that seemed too limited in its scope at the time, largely defined by medicine’s paradigm and traditional bio-medical sciencemodels. I felt a dissonance between nursing’s paradigm (yet to be defined as such) of caring-healing and health, and medicine’s paradigm of diagnosis and treatment, and concentration on disease and pathology. (p. 49) The theory of human caring evolved asWatson went on to solve other conceptual problems, aswell as philosophic prob-lems about nursing. The theory, whichwas initially published in Watson’s (1985) book Nursing: Human Science and Hu-man Care: A Theory of Nursing, focuses on the human com-ponent of caring and the moment-to-moment encounters be-tween the one who is caring and the one who is being cared for, especially the caring activities performed by nurses as they interactwith others. In 1996,Watson commented that the theory has continued to evolve “until this moment in history” (p. 141). I first interviewed JeanWatson in February l989 inDenver