The Wisdom of Sherwin Nuland

Excerpt

When The New York Times announced in March 5, 2014 the death of surgeon and man of letters Sherwin Nuland, I felt like I had lost a friend. Maybe not a close personal friend but a fellow journeyer in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century seeking to comprehend the complex and interdependent relationship among literature, science, and the practice and art of medicine. I had first met and spoken with Nuland when he came to give Grand Rounds in the Department of Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College in the late 1990s. It turned out we had a mutual friend at Yale where Nuland had taught and practiced medicine for many years. As was the case with many of those whose lives he affected and who listened to and corresponded with him the impact on me was singular and lasting. In my own experience, only William Sloane Coffin, chaplain at Yale, anti-war activist, and preacher without peer, came close to holding a similar hold on my imagination. My abiding interest in Nuland and his work led me to write reviews of three of his books that appeared in the pages of the Journal. They are The Wisdom of the Body (later reissued as How We Live) in 1997, The Mysteries Within: A Surgeon Reflects on Medicine’s Myths in 2000, and his brief but revealing autobiography Leonardo Da Vinci in 2003. I had commenced my literary exploration of Nuland’s work with an earlier review for another professional publication of How We Die that won a National book Award in 1994. …