The largest website for English phrases and quotes

The largest website for English phrases and quotes

Category: Sherwin B. Nuland

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.

Study, Early, New

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.

Training, Suffering, Long

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.

Justice, Ethics

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.

Hope, Same, Names

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.

Ethics, Government, Impact

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.

Culture, Ethics, American

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.

Society, Rules, Cancer

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.

Battle, Lost, Enemy

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.

Time, Fear, School

Sherwin B. Nuland

Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force

death, medicine

Sherwin B. Nuland

In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society.

cancer, medicine

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. 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. Even the confrontation with disease should be approached with the realization that many of the sicknesses of our species are simply conveyances for the inexorable journey by which each of us is returned to the same state of physical, and perhaps spiritual, nonexistence from which we emerged at conception. Every triumph over some major pathology, no matter how ringing the victory, is only a reprieve from the inevitable end.

death, medicine, science