Summary•This paper gives a brief account of the development of individualized nursing care, from the introduction of the nursing process to the more recent interest in primary nursing.•Individualized care would appear to have been adopted as an ideal by the nursing profession, with little debate about some of the possible implications of such an approach.•The paper outlines some other perspectives on patient care, and discusses the limitations of an individualistic framework which fails to acknowledge the communal and societal aspects of patient