Sherwin B. Nuland Quotes

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.

The growing professional disciplines of medical ethics and bioethics have had a profound impact on researchers, bedside doctors, associations of physicians, and government.

If there’s one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are 15 operations, you know that none of them work.

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.

We have had a rewarding relationship, the belly and I.

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.

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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I was, in the 1960s, in a marriage. To use the word ‘bad‘ would be perhaps the understatement of the year. It was dreadful.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

Where nothing in a person‘s earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.

Death belongs to the dying and those who love them.

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.

Whether wisely or not, one of the first priorities of the incoming Obama administration was to present a package of healthcare benefits, which, to no one’s surprise, produced an uproar in Congress and an assortment of polls declaring that the majority of Americans were opposed to it.

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.