Abstract
We here at the Faculty of Education and Welfare Studies, Caring Science, recently received sad news, when word came that Professor Emeritus Katie Eriksson had passed away. I believe I speak not only for myself but for many others both here in Vaasa and as well as in neighbouring countries when I say that we mourn the loss of a great pioneer in the field of caring science in the Nordic countries.
Born in Jakobstad, Finland, the 18th of November, 1943, Professor Katie Eriksson passed away on the 30th of August this year at the age of 75. First a practicing nurse, then a public health nurse, then nursing educator, she continued her academic studies at the University of Helsinki where she obtained an MA degree in philosophy in 1974, a Licentiate in philosophy in 1976, and a doctorate in Education in 1982. The nursing process was the subject of her doctoral dissertation.
One can describe Professor Eriksson’s career as consisting of two phases. During the first of these, from 1970 to 1986, she became an outstanding educator in caring science and, as such, was promoted to principal at the Helsinki Swedish School of Nursing. During the second phase, from 1986 to 2011, she was promoted to Professor of Caring Science at the Department for Caring Science at Åbo Akademi University. In 1986 she was called on to develop and lead an education and research programme in the subject of caring science for Åbo Akademi University. A generous donation from the Swedish-language Society of Nursing in Finland enabled the creation of a four-year professorship, from 1987 to 1992. In 1992, she was appointed Professor of Caring Science at Åbo Akademi University in Vaasa. From 1996 to 2011, Professor Eriksson was also employed part-time as the Director of Nursing at Helsinki University Hospital, where she was responsible for research and development in the field of caring science. In 1998, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Nordic School of Public Health in Gothenburg, in recognition of her promotion of inter-Nordic cooperation. Professor Eriksson was even a key figure in the Nordic College of Caring Sciences and was named an honorary member of the society in 2011. She retired from her position at Åbo Akademi University in 2012, at the age of 68. In 2013, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Karlstad University.
Professor Eriksson’s strategy for obtaining deep understanding of central phenomena in caring was to ask ‘what’, not ‘how’. What is health, what is suffering, what is the basic motive of caring? Through ‘what’, she sought answers to the big, ontological questions. It was a matter of seeking and understanding the ontological substance. Love and charity, or caritas, as the basic motive of caring, became a lodestar in all instruction.
Professor Eriksson introduced the expression ‘optimal health’, which became an important concept when the Caring Science Department started here in Vaasa in 1987. Health as soundness, freshness and well-being; health is relative; health is integration; the health premise. Professor Eriksson was an early pioneer of the idea that we, as caregivers, can promote patients’ health processes by focusing on each patient’s health resources. To maintain in the mid-1980s that subjective well-being was an important aspect of health was unique. To maintain that health was more than the absence of illness was to go against the established wisdom in healthcare at the time, that is to say the medical paradigm. Another subject that stirred up discussion was the subdiscipline of the theology of caring, which she had already begun to investigate in 1987. In the theology of caring she emphasized the importance of understanding the patient’s perceptions of the meaning of life, religious practice, and spiritual needs. To so strongly include in care the concept of suffering and the spiritual needs of humans was, from my perspective today, among her most important contributions. But at the same time, this is something that we today should contemplate: how do we describe these dimensions in a multicultural world, where patients come from many different religious backgrounds?
Professor Eriksson’s scientific contributions have been comprehensive. As of 2011 approximately 400 scientific titles in various publications have been attributed to her. She was also an active book writer. The nursing care process was published in 1981, followed by, among others, The idea of health (1984), The pause (1987), The idea of caring (1987), and The suffering human being (1994). Many of her books have been translated into Finnish, Norwegian and Danish. As late as 2018, Professor Eriksson published one of her most important books, a compilation entitled, Caring science: The science of caring and the timeless in time. In a significant international recognition of her contributions to caring theory, an entire chapter dedicated to her work, entitled ‘Katie Eriksson: Theory of caritative caring’, was included in the 2005 classic text, Nursing theorists and their work (Tomey and Alligood, eds). In this book, Eriksson’s work was included in the unit on nursing philosophies. Professor Eriksson’s main research focus has been clearly aimed toward basic research with a special interest in caring science theory and caring ethics, later known as ethos.
Professor Eriksson was even a frequent lecturer, both in the Nordic countries and internationally. Looking back, I maintain that she was one of the most well-known caring theorists and that she greatly influenced not only nursing education throughout the Nordic countries but also higher education and research in general during the 1980s and 1990s. In her development of caring science, she demonstrated a strong belief in the importance of concepts and language. Ontology was clearly of greater significance than epistemological or methodological questions, excepting hermeneutics and conceptual analysis.
A theorist of great importance to education and research in nursing and caring in the Nordic countries has left us, and we remember her life and work with gratitude. We have great faith in the further development of her theory of caritative caring.
May she rest in peace.