DIALOGICAL NURSING: ART-SCIENCE Art and science, like nursing, represent angular views. Each is a view with a particular purpose. They are human responses to the everyday world in which man lives. Existentially speaking, each is a form of living dialogue between man and his human situation. It is possible that there is in nursing a kind of human response to reality that is a combination, a true synthesis of art and science? The more one focuses on nursing as it is lived, on the intersubjective transaction as it is experienced in the everyday world, the more questions arise about it as art and science. Elements of both art and science are evident in nursing. The practicing nurse must integrate them in her mode of being in the situation. While Dr. Josephine Paterson was developing a methodology of inquiry from a clinical nursing process and describing her construct of the "all-at-once," she was so intent on communicating the interrelated reality of the art and science elements in nursing, that she welded them together with a hyphen into one word, "art-science." And even then there is some dissatisfaction when the weld is interpreted merely as a seam. For the combination is more than additive; it is a new synthetic whole. I experienced a similar difficulty in trying to describe the synthesis of art and science that takes place in the nursing process. The nursing dialogue reflects the orientations of art and science for it involves both the patient's and the nurse's subjective and objective worlds. I believe the synthesis of art and science is _lived_ by the nurse in the nursing act. This is a phenomenon more readily experienced than described. Yet if we truly experience nursing as a kind of art-science, as a particular kind of flowing, synthesizing, subjective-objective intersubjective dialogue, then nursing offers a unique path to human knowledge and it is our responsibility to try to describe and share it. FOOTNOTES: [1] New England Council on Higher Education for Nursing, _Humanities and the Arts as Bases for Nursing:_ Implications for Newer Dimensions in Generic Nursing Education, Proceedings of the Fifth Inter-University Work Conference (Lennox, Mass: New England Council on Higher Education for Nursing, June, 1968). "Humanities, Humaneness, Humanitarianism," Editorial in _Nursing Outlook_, Vol. 18, No. 9 (September, 1970), p. 21. Charles E. Berry and E. J. Drummond, "The Place of the Humanities in Nursing Education," _Nursing Outlook_, Vol. 18, No. 9 (September, 1970), pp. 30-31. Marion E. Kalkman, "The Role of the Humanities in Graduate Programs in Nursing," in _Doctoral Preparation for Nurses_, ed. Esther A. Garrison (San Francisco: University of California, 1973), pp. 138-155. [2] Mary Jane Trautman, "Nurses as Poets," _American Journal of Nursing_, Vol. 71, No. 4 (April, 1971), p. 727. [3] _Ibid._, p. 728. [4] _Ibid._ [5] Chaim Potok, _My Name Is Asher Lev_ (Greenwich, Conn.: Fawcett Publications, 1972), p. 105.