2. Martha Elizabeth Rogers (May 12, 1914 – March 13,
1994) was an American nurse, researcher, theorist, and
author widely known for developing the Science of Unitary
Human Beings and her landmark book, An Introduction the
Theoretical Basis of Nursing.
She believes that a patient can never be separated from
their environment when addressing health and
treatment. Her knowledge about the coexistence of the
human and his or her environment contributed a lot in
changing toward better health.
3. Early Life
Martha Rogers was born on May 12, 1914, sharing a
birthday with Florence Nightingale. She was the
eldest of four children of Bruce Taylor Rogers and
Lucy Mulholland Keener Rogers.
She had a thirst for knowledge at an early age. She
found Kindergarten to be “terribly exciting” and had
a love and passion for books that her parents
fostered.
4. In fact, Rogers already knew the Greek alphabet by age
10. By the sixth grade, she already finished reading all
20 volumes of The Child’s Book of Knowledge and was
into the Encyclopedia Britannica.
She also loved to read various topics like anthropology,
archaeology, cosmology, ethnography, astronomy,
ethics, psychology, eastern philosophy, and aesthetics.
By her senior year, she had completed all the high
school math courses and took a college-level algebra
course where she was the only female in the class.
5. Education
Initially, Martha Rogers wanted to do something that
would hopefully contribute to social welfare like law
and medicine. However, she only studied medicine for
a couple of years because women in medicine were
not particularly desirable during her time. Instead,
along with her friend, Rogers entered a local hospital
that had a school of nursing. But just like Nightingale,
her parents weren’t really any happier over that
decision than they had between over medicine.
6. She then transferred to Knoxville General Hospital’s
nursing program and was one of 25 students in her
class. She described her training as at times as being
miserable because the training was like the “Army, pre-
Nightingale.” She even spent a week at home, thinking
of not returning to school but eventually enjoyed
working with people and patients.
Rogers received her nursing diploma from the
Knoxville General Hospital School of Nursing in 1936,
then earned her Public Health Nursing degree from
George Peabody College in Tennessee in 1937. She sold
her car to pay for tuition and entered a Master’s
degree program full-time.
7. Theory: The Science of Unitary
Human Beings
Martha Rogers’ theory is known as the Science of
Unitary Human Beings (SUHB). The theory views
nursing as both a science and an art as it provides a
way to view the unitary human being, who is integral
with the universe. The unitary human being and his or
her environment are one.
8. SUHB contains two dimensions:
1. Science of Nursing- which is the knowledge specific
to the field of nursing that
comes from scientific research
2. Art of Nursing- which involves using the
science of nursing creatively
to help better the lives of the
patient.
9. Assumptions
1. Man is a unified whole possessing his own integrity and manifesting
characteristics that are more than and different from the sum of his parts.
2. Man and the environment are continuously exchanging matter and
energy with one another.
3. The life process evolves irreversibly and unidirectional along the space-
time continuum.
4. Pattern and organization identify the man and reflect his innovative
wholeness.
5. Man is characterized by the capacity for abstraction and imagery,
language and thought sensation, and emotion.
10. Major Concepts and Metaparadigm
1. Human as unitary human beings
A person is defined as an indivisible, pan-dimensional energy field
identified by a pattern and manifesting characteristics specific to
the whole.
2. Health
Rogers defines health as an expression of the life process. The
characteristics and behavior coming from the mutual, simultaneous
interaction of the human and environmental fields and health and
illness are part of the same continuum.
11. 3. Nursing
It is the study of unitary, irreducible, indivisible human and
environmental fields: people and their world. Rogers claims that
nursing exists to serve people, and the safe practice of nursing
depends on the nature and amount of scientific nursing knowledge
the nurse brings to his or her practice.
4. Scope of Nursing
Nursing aims to assist people in achieving their maximum health
potential. Maintenance and promotion of health, prevention of
disease, nursing diagnosis, intervention, and rehabilitation
encompass the scope of nursing’s goals.
12. 5. Environmental Field
“An irreducible, indivisible, pan-dimensional energy field identified
by pattern and integral with the human field.”
6. Energy Field
The energy field is the fundamental unit of both the living and the
non-living. It provides a way to view people and the environment as
irreducible wholes. The energy fields continuously vary in intensity,
density, and extent.
13. Openness- There are no boundaries that stop energy flow between
the human and environmental fields, openness in Rogers’ theory. It
refers to qualities exhibited by open systems; human beings and their
environment are open systems.
Sub concepts
Pattern- distinguishing characteristic of an energy field seen as a
single wave. It is an abstraction and gives identity to the field.
14. Pan-dimensional- Pan-dimensionality is defined as a “non-linear
domain without spatial or temporal attributes.” Humans’ parameters to
describe events are arbitrary, and the present is relative; there is no
temporal ordering of lives.
Synergy is defined as the unique behavior of whole systems,
unpredicted by any behaviors of their component functions taken
separately.
Human behavior is synergistic.
Principles of Hemodynamics- postulate a way of viewing unitary
human beings. The three principles of hemodynamics are resonance,
helicy, and integrality.
15. Principle of Reciprocity- Postulates the inseparability of man and
environment and predicts that sequential changes in the life process
are continuous, probabilistic revisions occurring out of the interactions
between man and environment.
Principle of Synchrony- This principle predicts that change in human
behavior will be determined by the simultaneous interaction of the
actual state of the human field and the environmental field’s actual
state at any given point in space-time.
16. Principle of Integrality (Synchrony + Reciprocity)- Because of the
inseparability of human beings and their environment, sequential
changes in the life processes are continuous revisions occurring from
the interactions between human beings and their environment.
Principle of Resonancy- It speaks to the nature of the change
occurring between human and environmental fields. The life process in
human beings is a symphony of rhythmical vibrations oscillating at
various frequencies.
17. Science of Unitary Human Beings and Nursing Process
The nursing process has three steps in Rogers’ Theory of Unitary
Human Beings: assessment, voluntary mutual patterning, and
evaluation.
The assessment areas are the total pattern of events at any given point
in space-time, simultaneous states of the patient and his or her
environment, rhythms of the life process, supplementary data,
categorical disease entities, subsystem pathology, and pattern
appraisal. The assessment should be a comprehensive assessment of
the human and environmental fields.
18. Mutual patterning of the human and environmental fields includes:
• sharing knowledge
• offering choices
• empowering the patient
• fostering patterning
• evaluation
• repeat pattern appraisal, which includes nutrition, work/leisure
activities, wake/sleep cycles, relationships, pain, and fear/hopes
• identify dissonance and harmony
• validate appraisal with the patient
• self-reflection for the patient
19. Strengths
Martha Rogers’ concepts provide a worldview from which nurses may
derive theories and hypotheses and propose relationships specific to
different situations.
Rogers’ theory is not directly testable due to a lack of concrete
hypotheses, but it is testable in principle.
Weaknesses
Rogers’ model does not define particular hypotheses or theories, for it is
an abstract, unified, and highly derived framework.
Testing the concepts’ validity is questionable because its concepts are
not directly measurable.
20. Conclusion
The Science of Unitary Human Beings is highly generalizable as the
concepts and ideas are not confined to a specific nursing approach,
unlike the usual way of other nurse theorists defining the major
concepts of a theory.
Rogers gave much emphasis on how a nurse should view the patient.
She developed principles that emphasize that a nurse should view the
client as a whole.
Her statements, in general, made us believe that a person and his or her
environment are integral to each other. A patient can’t be separated
from his or her environment when addressing health and treatment.
Her conceptual framework has greatly influenced nursing by offering an
alternative to traditional nursing approaches.
