Taking refuge in how: An analysis of human suffering in five novels by African-American writers.

摘要

Human suffering is a complex experience and a fundamental concern for nurses. It is also a raison d'etre for great works of art, literature, and music, and an integral part of existence. According to Florence Nightingale, suffering is separate and distinct from pain, or illness and disease. It interferes with the patient's natural restorative processes, and delays or prevents recovery. The alleviation of human suffering is within nursing's domain, and in Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not, Nightingale urges nurses to discover the causes of suffering, and take pains to relieve or mediate it.;Nurses continue to have a vested interest in learning more about how suffering is experienced, and while we are beginning to build a substantial knowledge base related to its nature, acquiring knowledge about suffering must be considered ongoing. For example, little is known about what happens if suffering is not relieved or the mechanisms that combine to make it unbearable. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine human suffering, and the factors associated with situations in which suffering is perceived as intolerable. Five novels by African-American writers are analyzed using Toni Morrison's characteristics of Black art as a framework.;The findings suggest that, for the characters in these novels, the signs and symptoms of suffering are generally consistent with those described in the nursing and biomedical ethics literature with the exception of shame, self-loathing, humiliation, and voicelessness. As its symptoms increase, human suffering represents a threat to the characters' essential self, but the number and severity of its signs cannot be used to predict which individuals will succumb. In this study, intolerable suffering is conceptualized as a fatal state of being that results from the failure of the sufferer's ancestral system. The ancestor, a central concept of Morrison's paradigm, is the source of wisdom, instruction, protection and benevolence. Because the ancestral system parallels the functions of care across the human community, Morrison's paradigm will potentially help us to understand suffering in a variety of contexts.