Objective: Today's nursing journals have limited content on care of people at end of life. This study examines the content of the American Journal of Nursing, for end-of-life care to determine if ancestral nursing colleagues were more knowledgeable in this field than contemporary nurses.
Sample and years: The study sample consisted of 327 articles dealing with end-of-life care that were identified from American Journal of Nursing published in 1900 through 1999.
Design: This was a qualitative study.
Method: In this study the selected articles were analyzed, topics were categorized and the numbers of pages were summed. Contextual factors were considered in this analysis, such as the evolution of life-sustaining technologies, development of hospice, role of analgesics, and settings for care of the dying.
Findings: Before 1930 there were only nine articles on this topic. Over fifty percent of the articles reviewed were published between 1990 and 1999. The types of writings included educational articles about terminal illnesses and care, poems, and first-person narratives. The first-person narratives made an appearance in the 60s and have persisted as the most predominant form of publication about the end of life.
Conclusions: Nurses in the early part of the last century were not publishing content about end-of-life care as expected, even though care was mostly home-based and life-saving drugs and technologies did not exist. The numbers of publications in this field has increased over time with a predominant use of poetry and first-person narratives. Poetry and stories reflect the art of nursing and may serve the purposes of catharsis, case reporting, and calls for action, but they do not extend scholarly knowledge about best practices.
Implications: More attention must be given to publishing content that informs the field and advances Nursing?s body of science about care at the end of life.
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