Dr. SHERWIN NULAND (1930-2014)
A TRIBUTE TO A REMARKABLE
PHYSICIAN-WRITER
M. Saleem Seyal, MD, FACC, FACP
“I just loved Shep. He was such a kind, generous and smart
man. He definitely had strong opinions about lots of things but
he always articulated them beautifully. For my money, he was
the best doctor-writer of our era and was a serious doctor—
always endeavoring to heal those around him. I will miss him.
But thank goodness, his words and life will live on in all those
wonderful books.”
Howard Markel, MD, PhD (via e-mail to Dr. Seyal)
George E. Wantz Distinguished Professor of the History of
Medicine
Founding Director, Center of the History of Medicine
The University of Michigan
D
r. Sherwin Nuland was a famous author who has been well known for his
highly acclaimed book entitled “How
We Die – Reflections of Life’s Final Chapter”
that was published in 1994. This influential
book engendered a national debate about endof-life care and garnered him a National Book
Award. Two decades after publication of that
seminal book, Dr. Nuland passed away at his
home in Hamden, Connecticut on March 5, 2014. The world has lost
a highly elegant wordsmith with a razor-sharp mind who has left
behind a tremendous legacy of many books and essays along with
his candid, honest and beautifully eloquent talks and lectures – all
will be cherished for a long time. “He was incapable of composing
a sentence that wasn’t clear, elegant, and true,” wrote Dr. Markel in
his in-memoriam piece about Dr. Nuland in the March 10, 2014
issue of The New Republic. He was a brilliant surgeon who worked
for 30 years at the Yale-New Haven Hospital where he served as
a clinical professor of Surgery at the Yale School of Medicine and
subsequently, even after his retirement from the OR, he continued
to teach Bioethics and History of Medicine at Yale.
He was born in the East Bronx as Shepsel Ber Noodleman on
December 8, 1930 in an impoverished household, and lived with
his Russian Jewish immigrant parents and several other relatives in
a cramped apartment in a crowded tenement. His Yiddish-speaking
father, Meyer Nudelman, came to the United States at age 19 and
worked as a semi-skilled worker in the garment trade and adamantly
refused to assimilate or learn English, “a man with no past… he
never figures this country out,” Dr. Nuland later stated. Meyer had
several physical disabilities and was dependent on Shep to help him
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LOUISVILLE MEDICINE
navigate the stairs in their apartment and treacherous New York
streets during snow. Meyer displayed frequent bouts of rage and his
violent temper terrified the family. In his haunting autobiographical
book “Lost in America—A Journey with My Father,” Nuland wrote
a brutally honest account of his upbringing under terribly difficult
circumstances when he was continually “living with a sense of
looming tragedy….. Death was part of the legacy and lore of our
family.” His grandmother who lived with the family had lost her
three sons to tuberculosis. His mother had one stillbirth and lost
another son at