[Compassion--a forgotten tradition in nursing care?]

This scientific study is based on the assumption that the Jewish-Christian motive of the compassionate God is the original model of the nurse. Accordingly it investigates the Wirkungs- and Rezeptionsgeschichte (the history of the tradition) of this motive in nursing from the perspectives of Nursing Science and Jewish Studies. To this purpose it was necessary to apply a transdisciplinary and methodologically pluralistic research approach. It involved various applications of hermeneutics such as applied by theology, historiography and philosophy. The research material comprised primary sources from Jewish and Christian scriptures and commentaries as well as nursing literature from the 19th and 20th century. A comparative analysis of the phenomenology of the research object during these periods was carried out: The results support the initial assumption and show that the motive of the compassionate God was actualised over the last 2000 years. What originally appeared as a religious motive presents itself as nursing concept under the name compassion or caring in modern and post-modern nursing theory.