Dr. Sherwin Nuland, Surgeon, Author of 'How We Die' is Dead at 83

This morning while browsing through my New York Times app (I’m so modern!), I was saddened to see the obituary for Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, who wrote the impressive and ground breaking 1994 National Book Award winner, “How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter” (Amazon Affiliate Link). I know many hospice and palliative care professionals likely have this black and white paperback sitting on their bookshelf. Maybe they picked it up at a used book sale like I did, or maybe it was passed onto them by a mentor, but I wonder how many of the current practicing generation of professionals have actually read this seminal work? I read it in 2004 when I was a hospice and palliative care fellow and I was so hungry for any knowledge about how to be a better doctor for people at the end of life. It may be hard to believe, but in 2004 there wasn't a lot of readily available information like we have seen in the past few years. The lessons from the book still resonated, even though the book was a decade old at the time I read it.As a surgeon he recognized that he had been fighting against death and instead over-medicalizing this universal human event throughout his career and was willing to say it publicly and call out the medical establishment for doing the same. The New York Times obituary points out that Nuland himself worked hard to give his brother hope for cure and survival before his death in 1990, which is a familiar story to anyone who has ever cared for a patient w...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Carer Workers Authors: Source Type: blogs