Open-Hearted Flesh: Burn Injuries and Interpretation

This paper aims to describe the interpretive nature of burn care nursing using an example from the first author's practice. It asserts how burn injuries are uniquely situated from a hermeneutic perspective as an embodied change that alters the way a burn injured person lives in the world. This paper was written for an assignment in a hermeneutic methodology class, focused on the role of the burns nurse, and further expanded in relation to the hermeneutic significance of burn injuries. It demonstrates the fit of hermeneutics as a way of understanding nursing practice and burn injuries and serves as a support to the use of hermeneutics in the author's Master of Nursing thesis project exploring the experiences of burn survivors.