[Introductory remarks to an empirical science of care]

The academic birth of the nursing science has created a disciplinary problem of the statute, epistemological bases of the relation between the sciences of nature and the sciences of man. The real subject of the nursing science is the care and its reason for being is in the ability of motivating with scientific and rational bases the choices of nursing care. Because of its characteristics the nursing science is tended towards the practice more than to a speculative knowledge, so the nursing science can be called "empiric science of care". It treats man in regard to quality, to relation, to the metaphoric interpretation of life and health more than to measurement. For its ability of investigate with methodological rigor, the nursing science is able to build a proper body of knowledges, crossing all the other disciplines involved in the study of man (cross-disciplinarity). Obviously, first of all, it's a question of pragmatic/assertive knowledge and only subordinately a nomothetic/predictive one. Evidently, nursing science and profession are not at once identifiable or overlying, we are going towards a new professional construction, which is changing the basic characteristics of the previous education, goes beyond it to reach another identity. Medicine is defined the "science of disease", differently from nursing which we can describe as a paradigmatic science of health.