The legacy of letter writing as a clinical practice: introduction to the special issue on therapeutic letters.

摘要

It is with considerable pleasure that I write this introduction to this special issue on letter writing in this journal. I believe it to be the first of its kind. I have been aware for some time of Wright, Bell, Moules, and their colleagues and students at the Family Nursing Unit, Faculty of Nursing, University of Calgary. It is with this issue that I can acknowledge them as having created their own genre of letter-writing that might best go under Moules' title for her paper, "Family Suffering and Healing Words." For some time, I have wanted to spend a week or two with them in Calgary but this has never come to pass. However, this journal issue sums up the ingenious innovations that they have contributed to the therapeutic practice of letter writing. Moules' paper, "Therapeutic letters in nursing: Examining the character and influence of the written word in clinical work with families experiencing illness" (Moules, 2009b), written with such felicity and grace, is an elegy to this craft and art.