Sherwin B. Nuland
Sherwin B. Nuland
Sherwin Bernard Nulandwas an American surgeon and writer who taught bioethics, history of medicine, and medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, and occasionally bioethics and history of medicine at Yale College. His 1994 book How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter was a New York Times Best Seller and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionScientist
Date of Birth8 December 1930
CountryUnited States of America
age cancer cells excessive fixed immature learned living needs rules society
Cancer cells are fixed at an age where they are still too young to have learned the rules of the society in which they live. As with so many immature individuals of all living kinds, everything they do is excessive and uncoordinated with the needs or constraints of their neighbors... they are reproductive but not productive.
none work
If there's one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are 15 operations, you know that none of them work.
certainly coming human saved
Do you know what the world will be saved by? I'll tell you. It'll be saved by the human spirit. And by the human spirit, I don't mean anything divine, I don't mean anything supernatural - certainly not coming from this skeptic.
We have had a rewarding relationship, the belly and I.
lived seek
The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.
belongs death love
Death belongs to the dying and those who love them.
completed conscious death fear medical time
I never had a conscious fear of death, but I did have a conscious fear of sickness. By the time I completed medical school, that fear was gone.
best biology both dying ecological individual inherent life planet served
Both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do.
alone communal danger family mind necessary otherwise stimulate
Too many of the elderly do not have the family or the communal attachments necessary to feel valued; too many are widowed or otherwise alone; too many live in surroundings where they are essentially without the companionship necessary to stimulate a mind in danger of deteriorating.
became begun disorders dominate entered matter mild mood notion patients relatively time
Once the notion of depression had begun to dominate the diagnostic armamentarium, it became but a matter of time before patients with relatively mild disorders of mood or anxiety would be entered into it.
death disease exhausting force requires
Not death but disease is the real enemy; disease, the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.
assigned fully known maladies mental might patients physical seemed specialty sufferings symptoms
Only the emerging specialty of psychoanalysis seemed to understand that mental maladies are not fully analogous to physical disease. They resist classification, and might better be known by their symptoms and the individualized sufferings of patients than by assigned names.
cannot demands handed healer individual judgment medical occasion periods taught
Medical judgment can be taught - laboriously, in long periods of training - but it cannot be neatly handed over as the occasion demands it. It is the irreplaceable and untransferable contribution that the healer makes to the suffering individual who would be healed.
achieve death event expression fact finality graceful last life nature ongoing repugnant sequence simply stark triumph universal yearning
'Death with dignity' is our society's expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms.