Martha Rogers argued that nursing is a science with its own subject matter, not a set of skills borrowed from medicine. Her particular theory remains contested. The argument underneath it is one she won outright.
Training
Rogers was born on May 12, 1914 in Dallas and grew up in Knoxville, Tennessee. She took her nursing diploma at Knoxville General in 1936, a public health nursing degree in 1937, a master's at Teachers College, Columbia in 1945, and then, unusually for a nurse of her generation, a Master of Public Health and a Doctor of Science at Johns Hopkins, finishing in 1954.
She spent years in rural public health nursing in Michigan and Arizona before the academic career.
New York University
From 1954 to 1975 Rogers headed the Division of Nursing at New York University, and she used it to force a series of arguments the profession had been avoiding.
She held that nursing's proper subject was not disease, organs or medical tasks but the whole person in their environment — and that if nursing had no distinct object of study, it had no claim to be a profession and would remain a set of delegated medical chores forever.
From that she took positions that made her enemies:
- That nursing required its own doctoral preparation and its own research base, not doctorates borrowed from education or sociology.
- That nursing education belonged in universities. She opposed the associate degree route and the hospital diploma school with some ferocity, and the entry into practice fight is still going on for the reasons she named.
- That the emerging nurse practitioner role, as she saw it, risked recruiting nurses into medicine rather than developing nursing. She and Loretta Ford were on opposite sides of this, publicly.
The Science of Unitary Human Beings
Rogers set out her theory in 1970. It treats the human being and the environment as irreducible energy fields in continuous mutual process, changing in one direction only, and not usefully understood by breaking them into parts. Health and illness are not opposites but expressions of the same pattern.
It is the most abstract theory in nursing and the most divisive. Supporters treat it as the discipline's most serious attempt at a unifying framework. Critics — including physicists objecting to the use of the word energy — treat it as unfalsifiable. It generated a great deal of research, including work on therapeutic touch that has not held up well.
Whatever one makes of the theory, the profession accepted the premise: nursing now has its own doctorates, its own federally funded research institute, and its own body of knowledge. Rogers spent thirty years insisting on that when it was not obvious.
She retired as professor emerita in 1979 and died on March 13, 1994, aged 79. She was inducted into the American Nurses Association Hall of Fame in 1996.
Related
- Nursing theory
- Entry into practice and the BSN requirement
- Dorothea Orem
- Loretta Ford
- The nurse faculty shortage
Sources
- Martha E. Rogers, for the chronology, the theory and her positions on nursing education. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- An Introduction to the Theoretical Basis of Nursing, Martha E. Rogers, 1970. Accessed September 9, 2026.
- ANA Hall of Fame inductees. American Nurses Association. Accessed September 9, 2026.