Redefining “Death in Dignity”: Sherwin Nuland’s How We Die

by Vivian LamWe begin with an image of Sherwin Nuland as a bright-eyed third year medical student, cutting open a dead man ’s chest and cupping his heart with bare hands.After several moments of desperation, the man, James McCarty, roars a death rattle that stops Nuland in his tracks. We look upon a vivid scene of carnage and defeat —Nuland is soaked with sweat and blood, sobbing and “demanding that he live, screaming his name into his left ear as though he could hear me, and weeping all the time with the frustration and sorrow of my failure, his” (7). Dave, the intern on duty, comes into the room and holds Nuland “as i f [they] were actors in an old World War II movie.” He patiently recounts the clinical and biological events that exonerate him of guilt, for McCarthy’s “death inevitably beyond [his] control,” and he had done “everything [he] could.” But what Nuland remembers most from his gentle minist rations is a statement that unravels over the course of the book: “Shep, now you know what it’s like to be a doctor” (8).Nuland ’s encounter with McCarthy serves as a microcosm of the recurring themes that arise from his systematic analysis of the multifaceted ways we approach death. In this failed act of heroism, we encounter the collateral damage of high-tech medicine’s pyrrhic war against death and disease, and the in difference and inevitable supremacy of nature. But it in his remorse that we are introduced to the power and comfort derived f...
Source: Pallimed: A Hospice and Palliative Medicine Blog - Category: Palliative Care Tags: book lam media review surgery Source Type: blogs