Sublime

Nuland was a renowned surgeon-philosopher whose seminal book about mortality, How We Die, had come out when I was in high school but made it into my hands only in medical school. Few books I had read so directly and wholly

Absent are the glib pronouncements and fuzzy circumlocutions that earlier writers had used to hide their ignorance.

As documented by Sherwin Nuland, clinical professor of surgery at Yale University and National Book Award winner for How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, many Americans have fallen prey to the idea, now avidly marketed by many big players in the health care industry, that medicine can offer a remedy to nature.

When there’s no place for the scalpel, words are the surgeon’s only tool.

backed-up

The psychoanalyst Philip M. Bromberg wrote, “Health is the ability to stand in the spaces between realities without losing any of them.

The “normal condition of existence” interested Rudolf Virchow as much as the abnormal. He believed, and time has vindicated him, that it is by the maintenance, or restoration, of equity between the basic units of life and their surroundings that health is to be most successfully nurtured, whether of the individual or the entire organism.