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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
Of all the named structures within the abdomen and the chest, those associated with reproduction retained the mysteries of their willful behavior long after others had been solved to the satisfaction of physicians and philosophers. Sherwin B. Nuland Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
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 Read Quote
