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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“I was, in the 1960s, in a marriage. To use the word 'bad' would be perhaps the understatement of the year. It was dreadful.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“'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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“If there's one operation for a disease, you know it works. If there are 15 operations, you know that none of them work.”

“I have not seen much dignity in the process by which we die. The quest to achieve true dignity fails when our bodies fail.”

“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.”

“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.”