Sherwin B. Nuland Quotes

To become comfortable with uncertainty is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.

The belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society’s, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person’s humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

A realistic expectation also demands our acceptance that one's allotted time on earth must be limited to an allowance consistent with the continuity of our species... We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions and trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died-in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.

The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope that we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.

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.

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.

I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

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.

If we cannot heal in one way, we must learn to heal in another.

Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.

Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.

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.

The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are. Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.

The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science

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 brains cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.

The dignity to be sought in death is the appreciation by others of what one has been in life,... that proceeds from a life well lived and from the acceptance of one's own death as a necessary process of nature.... It is also the recognition that the real event taking place at the end of our life is our death, not the attempts to prevent it.

Even putting aside the Judeo-Christian morality upon which the Constitution and our nations culture are based, the notion of forced euthanasia would contradict the long-held body of medical ethics to which all American doctors must adhere.