Oral history of Florence Downs; the early years

Florence Downs is a well-recognized nursing leader, educator, editor, and scholar who helped shape nursing as an intellectual discipline, and wrote extensively about the importance of links between research and practice.

Through the use of oral history data garnered over 15 hours of interviews, we constructed a narrative that describes some of Downs' formative experiences.

Oral history is used to place the "stories" of an individual into a social and cultural context, in this case, the development of the profession of nursing.

From the interviews, several strands emerged that defined Downs' extended career, including the importance of developing a community of scholars both in and outside of nursing, the dangers of parochialism, and the necessity of a perspective on life that melded a keen sense of humor. Factors that affected Downs' style and choice, especially her mother, and her educational experiences, were revealed.

From the interviews we gained a sense of how Downs constructed her conceptual universe of nursing, as well as the language and political effectiveness to overcome barriers confronting the intellectual growth of nursing mounted by other nursing leaders as well as traditional academic disciplines.