Sherwin B. Nuland Quotes

11 Sourced Quotes

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

Sherwin B. Nuland
If the classic image of dying with dignity must be modified or even discarded, what is to be salvaged of our hope for the final memories we leave to those who love us? The dignity we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.

Sherwin B. Nuland
Cancer cells behave like the members of a barbarian horde run amok—leaderless and undirected, but with a single-minded purpose: to plunder everything within reach.

Sherwin B. Nuland
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.

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

Sherwin B. Nuland
Just as physicians must constantly admonish one another to seek the most subtle beginnings of disease, they must also forgive themselves when timing or circumstances frustrate their best intentions.

Sherwin B. Nuland
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.

Sherwin B. Nuland
Self-awareness has never been the strong suit of those who choose to become doctors. When so much fuel is readily available for stoking the fires of ego, there is little inclination to apply it in raising the candlepower of the searching light that might illumine the inner man or woman.

Sherwin B. Nuland
The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail.

Sherwin B. Nuland
The very success of his esoteric therapeutics too often leads the physician to believe he can do what is beyond his doing and save those who, left to their own unhindered judgment, would choose not to be subjected to his saving.

Sherwin B. Nuland
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