Levine, Myra Estrin [1920–1996] , a nursing theorist who developed a framework for nursing practice with the formulation of Four Conservation Principles: energy, structural integrity, personal integrity, and social integrity. The first edition of her book discussing the conservation principles, Introduction to Clinical Nursing, was published in 1969. Levine’s emphasis on the ill person in the health care setting reflects the history of health care in the 1960s. Levine’s model stresses nursing interventions and interactions based on the scientific background of these principles. Levine viewed people in a holistic manner, as having their own environments, both internal and external. She identified four levels of integration that help a person maintain his or her integrity or wholeness: fight or flight, inflammatory response, response to stress, and perceptual response. The individual’s stability is organized by his or her availability of responses and adaptation processes. It is the nurse’s task to bring a body of scientific principles on which decisions are based into the situation shared with the patient.
