The essence of the nursing process can be summed up in this quotation by Sir Francis Bacon: “Human knowledge and human powers meet in one; for where the cause is not known the effect cannot be produced.” Arriving at a concise, accurate definition of the nursing process was, for me, an impossible task. It is altogether too vast and too personal a topic to contract down into a niftylooking, we-pay-lip-service-to-it cliché. So what I propose to do is to present my understanding of the nursing process throughout this essay, and then to leave the reader with some overall, general impression of what it all entails.