The content of this book has its origins in the writer’s teaching and research (McKenna, 1994a). Over a number of years, students, both at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, have stimulated the writer with their fresh views and critiques of nursing theories (McKenna, 1993). Practitioners too have contributed their opinions as to whether nursing theories were ‘ideal’ or ‘real’ (McKenna, 1992). There is the recognition that nurses throughout the world have spent an enormous amount of
time and effort formulating, learning and implementing nursing theories. In the late 1990s it is perhaps time to suggest that ‘the emperor has no clothes’. Therefore, the end result of these discussions, debates, arguments and reflections is a book which fills a niche in the market, one that uses the extant literature to provide a critical evaluation of nursing theories