Carper identifies four fundamental patterns of knowledge that contribute to the structure of nursing knowledge and the promotion of safe, quality patient care, including experiential, aesthetic, personal knowledge, and ethics (1978). According to Carper, empirical knowledge is knowledge of the science underlying nursing practice (1978). With empirical knowledge, a nurse relies on the scientific facts gathered during her years of training and experience and applies them to patient care in order to provide the best care possible. Knowledge of aesthetics, according to Carper, is knowledge of the art of nursing (1978). Aesthetic knowledge allows the nurse to rely on her own perceptions and intuitions about what a patient really needs to creatively design and implement the types of care that will be most effective and satisfying for her patient (Carper, 1978) . The third way of knowing, personal knowing, involves knowing, recognizing, and using the role that the individual self plays in nursing practice (Carper, 1978). Carper introduces the idea of ​​therapeutic self-use, in which the nurse sees the patient as more than just an object to be cared for and rather as another human being with whom to form a relationship (1978). Personal knowledge pushes the nurse to think about how she would like to be treated if the roles were reversed and motivates the nurse to involve the patient in every aspect of their care so that they receive quality care tailored to their specific needs . The final way of knowing, ethical knowing, is defined by Carper as including the nurse's sense of the right versus wrong thing to do in a given patient situation (1978). A nurse must rely on her moral intuition to ensure that any judgment made about a patient's care is ethical and in the patient's best interests.