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
I've seen so many patients, particularly elderly patients, over the years who become debilitated and changed by the process by which I cure them or another doctor cures them. And has it really been worth it?
The writings and the recommendations of the earliest medical scientists and the new breed of clinicians between the mid-fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries were based on the supposition that sufficient study and experimentation would elucidate not only the origins of disease, but its treatment as well.
Our deaths become a part of our lives in the sense that with our deaths we give something to those who are left behind, as we have given our lives to them.
Every hope of successive generations of scholars that order might be constructed from the chaotic mess of medical nomenclature has been frustrated. Even diseases recognized in the same historical period have been given names based on characteristics that have no relation to one another, and thus no common criteria.
Only by a frank discussion of the very details of dying can we best deal with those aspects that frighten us the most. It is by knowing the truth... that we rid ourselves of that fear of the terra incognita of death.
Of all the named structures within the abdomen and the chest, those associated with reproduction retained the mysteries of their willful behavior long after others had been solved to the satisfaction of physicians and philosophers.
I have been following the attempt to initiate or revamp federal involvement in the health of Americans since it was a major topic for my high school debating team in 1947.
Though President George W. Bush made some small noises about his intention to present some form of improved health coverage, nothing grew out of them.
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.
The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.
Death belongs to the dying and those who love them.
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.
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.