Quotes from Sherwin B. Nuland

the last hours. In fact, they are abandoned, to the good intentions of highly skilled professional personnel who barely know them.

Although it is not always admitted, the hospital has offered families a place where they can hide the unseemly invalid whom neither the world nor they can endure. … The hospital has become the place of solitary death.

bioengineers but by those who know who we are.

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.

This is the period when hard decisions are faced by families, having to do with the insertion of feeding tubes and the vigor with which medical measures should be taken to fend off those natural processes that descend like jackals—or perhaps like friends—on debilitated people.

To the wise advice that we live every day as though it will be our last, we do well to add the admonition to live every day as though we will be on this earth forever.

The greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope we call all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.

The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that proceeded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.

when the human spirit departs, it takes with it the vital stuffing of life. Then, only the inanimate corpus remains, which is the least of all the things that make us human.

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

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.

The very old do not succomb to disease-they implode their way into eternity. (How We Die)

Empires fall, ids explode, great symphonies are written, and behind all of it is a single instinct that demands satisfaction.

For many of the dying, intensive care, with its isolation among strangers, extinguishes their hope of not being abandoned in the last hours. If fact, they are abandoned, to the good intentions of highly skilled professional personnel who barely know them.

Though biomedical science has vastly increased mankind's average life expectancy, the maximum has not changed in verifiable recorded history.

Hope can still exist even when rescue is impossible.

Leonardo, with his profound knowledge of art, commenced various undertakings, many of which he never completed, because it appeared to him that the hand could never give due perfection to the object or purpose which he had in his thoughts, or beheld in his imagination - since in his mind he frequently formed some difficult conception, so subtle and so wonderful that no hands, however excellent or able, could ever give it expression

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.

The dignity that we seek in dying must be found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives. Ars moriendi as ars vivendi: The art of dying is the art of living. The honesty and grace of the years of life that are ending is the real measure of how we die. It is not in the last weeks or days that we compose the message that will be remembered, but in all the decades that preceded them. Who has lived in dignity, dies in dignity.

The dignity we create in the time allotted to us becomes a continuum with the dignity we achieve by the altruism of accepting the necessity of death.

Before you conclude that your options are limited, you need evidence that you cannot do something, rather than just deciding that you cannot do it.

We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions upon trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died — in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.

Every life is different from any that has gone before it, and so is every death.

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.