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. – Sherwin B. Nuland
Though moral axioms to guide the conduct of the practitioner have existed since the beginnings of the profession of healing, Western doctors are most likely to view the Hippocratic Oath of approximately two-and-a-half millennia ago as the first codified set of statements to which they can look for guidance. – Sherwin B. Nuland
Nosology (from the Greek ‘nosos,’ meaning ‘disease,’ and ‘logos,’ referring to ‘study’) is not a sport for the timid, and certainly not for those so scrupulous about rules and order that they demand consistency in all things. – Sherwin B. Nuland
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. – Sherwin B. Nuland
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. – Sherwin B. Nuland
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. – Sherwin B. Nuland
I was, in the 1960s, in a marriage. To use the word ‘bad’ would be perhaps the understatement of the year. It was dreadful. – Sherwin B. Nuland
You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body. – Sherwin B. Nuland
Long regarded as central to the contemporary understanding of medical ethics are four principles that must be satisfied in order to fulfill the requirements of moral decision-making. These principles are autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence. – Sherwin B. Nuland
The Scientific Revolution, that remarkable transformation of European thought that occurred between approximately 1550 and 1700, brought with it an ascendancy of the experimental method and the refusal to believe any explanation of natural phenomena that could not be proven to the satisfaction of the empirical observer. – Sherwin B. Nuland
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. – Sherwin B. Nuland
Even putting aside the Judeo-Christian morality upon which the Constitution and our nation’s culture are based, the notion of forced euthanasia would contradict the long-held body of medical ethics to which all American doctors must adhere. – Sherwin B. Nuland
The growing professional disciplines of medical ethics and bioethics have had a profound impact on researchers, bedside doctors, associations of physicians, and government. – Sherwin B. Nuland
The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. – Sherwin B. Nuland
There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents. – Sherwin B. Nuland
By the time of my ninth birthday, I had become a bit of a socialist, as I am said by conservative colleagues to be to this day. I went on within the next few years to volunteer as an envelope stuffer for the American Labor Party, and my political thinking has not shifted measurably since that time. – Sherwin B. Nuland
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. – Sherwin B. Nuland
I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good. – Sherwin B. Nuland
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. – Sherwin B. Nuland
Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain’s cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening – not to say healthy – old age. – Sherwin B. Nuland
There are resurrection themes in every society that has ever been studied, and it is because not just only do we fantasize about the possibility of resurrection and recovery, but it actually happens. And it happens a lot. – Sherwin B. Nuland
‘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. – Sherwin B. Nuland
It’s unnatural to believe death usually has a beauty and a concordance and is usually a coming together of your life’s work. It leads to frustration for the patient. And it leaves grieving families convinced they did something wrong. – Sherwin B. Nuland
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. – Sherwin B. Nuland
To become comfortable with uncertainty is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician. – Sherwin B. Nuland
