Beyond the treatment and care : the History of the doctor-patient relationship as a source to think the nurse-patient relationship in the XXIst century

The history of the relationship between doctors and patients shows that it is possible to find traces of attention from doctors towards patients as far back as the Antiquity. Nevertheless, at that time, this solicitude is made essentially in the name of nature through the sick individual. With the Middle Ages and the rise and growing importance of Christianity, the notion of person appeared, rising beyond the physical limits of the individual. At that time, the solicitude is then made in the name of God transcending, in that way, the sick person. It is only at the end of the XIXth century, with the movement of social transformation and secularization of the medical care, that it is possible to detect the notion of subject in the medical relation as proved by the emergence of the psychoanalysis. But at the same time, the spectacular evolution of medicine in its scientific component and its increasing importance during the next century made that it focused mainly on a naturalistic vision of the world of the medical care, to the detriment, most of the time, of a personal vision taking into account the deep-rooted social characters of the sick subject. From then on, the nursing profession could be seen, at the beginning of the XXIth century, as complementary to the medicine, through the development and the implementation of a dominant personal relation type without neglecting the naturalistic relation type. This prospect could be possible on the condition of developing the scientific knowledge allowing to give consistency and thickness to this way of seeing and acting centered on the person. An approach doubtless inspired by the care, yet going further its emotional and ethical meaning, in order to understand and to act better.