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" 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

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Cancer cells are fixed at an age where they are still too young to have learned the rules of the society in which they live. As with so many immature individuals of all living kinds, everything they do is excessive and uncoordinated with the needs or constraints of their neighbors... they are reproductive but not productive. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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 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

" 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

" 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

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

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

" 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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" '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

" 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

" 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. "

Sherwin B. Nuland