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" 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

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" 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 dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. "

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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. "

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

" Death belongs to the dying and those who love them. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression. "

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

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

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

" 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

" 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

" 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