Top 78 Sherwin B. Nuland Quotes
#1. 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
#2. If there's one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are 15 operations, you know that none of them work.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#3. Every life is different from any that has gone before it, and so is every death.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#4. At times, morality can be dismissed as a matter of personal conscience, no matter how widespread its acceptance. Ethics, on the other hand, arises from societal or group commitments to principia of behavior.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#5. 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.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#6. The very old do not succomb to disease-they implode their way into eternity. (How We Die)
Sherwin B. Nuland
#7. Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#8. Increasingly agitated, he tried to shout, but the only sound to come out of his mouth was a hoarse whisper, too small to be heard outside the room. The look on his face was heartrending to see, as he realized the futility of his strangled efforts.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#9. 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
#10. The good thing that may yet happen during dying is not the possibility of survival when we're beyond that point. The good thing that may yet happen is that our lives will have great meaning for those we leave behind.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#11. The dignity we create in the time allotted to us becomes a continuum with the dignity we achieve by the altruism of accepting the necessity of death.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#12. The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science
Sherwin B. Nuland
#13. 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
#14. All through your life you are building an intellectual and emotional framework and it gets bigger and bigger and the more there are places where books and experiences can latch.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#15. Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force
Sherwin B. Nuland
#16. The dignity we seek in dying is not to be found in our final weeks, days or moments but in the way we live and how we are seen by those people whose lives we affect.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#17. 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.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#18. 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
#19. The force of life fills out our tissues with its pulsing vibrancy and puffs them up with the pride of being alive. Whether it departs with a bang, or a prolonged whimper, it often leaves behind an object of shrunken unrealness.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#20. -when the human spirit departs, it takes with it the vital stuffing of life. Then, only the inanimate corpus remains, which is the least of all the things that make us human.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#21. ... death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#23. For aging is an art. The years between its first intimations and the time of the ultimate letting go of all earthly things can-if the readiness and resolve are there-be the real harvest of our lives.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#24. 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.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#25. 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.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#26. 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
#27. 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
#28. Human beings are capable of the kind of love and loyalty that transcends not only the physical debasement but even the spiritual weariness of the years of sorrow.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#29. We are not well served by being lulled into unjustified expectations.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#30. The final disease that nature inflicts on us will determine the atmosphere in which we take our leave of life, but our own choices should be allowed, insofar as possible, to be the decisive factor in the manner of our going.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#31. There is a nice Victorian reticence in denying the probability of a miserable prelude to mortality, and it is what everyone wants to hear. But if peace and dignity are what we delude ourselves to expect, most of us will die wondering what we, our our doctos, have done wrong.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#32. The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we call all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#33. We bear more than pain and sorrow when we depart life. Among the heaviest burdens is apt to be regret, which deserves a word at this point.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#34. Whatever mystery attaches to such a death is imposed on it by those who live. It is a tribute to the human spirit that the life preceding triumphs over the ugly events that most of us will experience as we die, or as we move toward our last moments.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#35. 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?
Sherwin B. Nuland
#36. The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#37. 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
#39. 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
#40. 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.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#42. When we mourn, it should be the loss of love that makes us grieve, not the guilt that we did something wrong.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#43. The lesson is never learned - there will always be those who persist in seeking the Fountain of Youth, or at least delaying what is irrevocably ordained.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#44. 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
#45. For many of the dying, intensive care, with its isolation among strangers, extinguishes their hope of not being abandoned in the last hours. If fact, they are abandoned, to the good intentions of highly skilled professional personnel who barely know them.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#47. 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
#48. 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
#49. Though biomedical science has vastly increased mankind's average life expectancy, the maximum has not changed in verifiable recorded history.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#50. Nature will always win in the end, as it must if our species is to survive.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#51. 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.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#52. Hope is an abstract word. In fact, it is more than just a word; hope is an abstruse concept, meaning different things to each of us during different times and circumstances of our lives. Even politicians know its hold on the human mind, and the mind of the electorate.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#53. Persistence can only break the hearts of those we love and of ourselves as well, not to mention the purse of society that should be spent for the care of others who have not yet lived their allotted time.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#54. Moths and flames, mankind and death
there is little difference.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#55. 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
#56. '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
#57. If we cannot heal in one way, we must learn to heal in another.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#58. The ultimate aim of the scientist is not only knowledge for the sake of knowledge, but knowledge with the aim of overcoming that in our environment which he views as hostile. None of the acts of nature (or Nature) is more hostile than death.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#59. Could there, I wanted to know, be any dignity in such a death? Can anything be salvaged of what once was, to bring a sense of himself to aman near his final hour, when he has been through so much?
Sherwin B. Nuland
#60. 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
#61. 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
#62. 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
#63. The only certainty, whether spoken or not, is that the doctors, nurses, and technicians are fighting not only death but their own uncertainties as well. In most resuscitations, those can be narrowed down to two main questions: Are we doing the right things? and, Should we be doing anything at all?
Sherwin B. Nuland
#64. 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
#65. 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
#66. Today the law defines death, with appropriate blurriness, as the cessation of brain function. Though the heart may still throb and the unknowing bone marrow create new cells, no man's history can outlive his brain.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#67. How much of the "good death" is for the person dying and how much for the person helping him?
Sherwin B. Nuland
#68. I have not seen much dignity in the process by which we die. The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#69. The heart is far more than just another stolidly stupid pump - it is a responsive, dynamic participant in the enterprise of life, capable of adaptation, accommodation, and, to some extent, repair.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#70. No matter the technological sophistication of ultramodern molecular research, and no matter the increasingly abstruse terminology of its current literature, the circle of knowledge always returns to its starting point: In order to live, man must have air.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#71. In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#72. 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
#74. Nature is being kind without knowing it, as nature can be cruel without knowing it.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#75. 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
#76. To become comfortable with uncertainty is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#77. 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.
Sherwin B. Nuland
#78. Before you conclude that your options are limited, you need evidence that you cannot do something, rather than just deciding that you cannot do it.
Sherwin B. Nuland
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