get out of New York and as if to get away from his demanding and
violent father, he was accepted at Yale for his medical education.
After obtaining his medical degree in 1955, he started his surgical residency at Yale-New Haven Hospital and served as the chief
resident in his final year of training. His feelings towards his father
softened eventually with the physical distance between them and
after learning that his father’s disabilities were secondary to tabes
dorsalis- a manifestation of tertiary syphilis. He started a thriving
surgical practice in New Haven, got married and had two children.
At age 42, his life was turned upside down as he lapsed into a more
severe and incapacitating bout of depression and obsessive thoughts
that lasted for over a year and required institutionalization in the
early 1970s. Divorce from his first wife unsettled him significantly,
his practice suffered and he was again close to being financially
ruined. Frontal lobotomy was considered by his senior physicians
but one psychiatry resident, Dr. Vittorio Ferrero intervened and
alternatively recommended electroconvulsive therapy which was
carried out with excellent clinical response. Dr. Nuland courageously
narrated the story of his depression, and the beneficial effect of
electroconvulsive therapy, in unflinching detail during his famous
2001 Technology, Entertainment and Design (TED) talk. This talk
was released in October 2007 and “remains one of the most powerful
moments in the conference’s history,” according to TED’s Curator,
Chris Anderson. Sherwin re-married in 1977 to his second wife,
Sarah Peterson, and they had two more children. He returned to
his two passions—surgery and writing. He retired from surgery in
1991 and pursued full-time his writing and speaking career, with
remarkable success.
“The Origins of Anesthesia” is a beautiful leather-bound book
edited by Dr. Nuland and produced in the Historical library of the
Yale School of Medicine. In addition to his excellent introduction, he
wrote commentaries that preceded each historical paper in original
form with extensive bibliography.
“Medicine—The Art of Healing” is a coffee table picture book of
medical progress reproducing “a cavalcade of medical images with
great appeal,” including the Hippocratic Oath, Theodore Billroth
operating in Vienna in front of an eager audience, and the first operation under ether at the Massachussetts General Hospital in 1846.
He includes a portrait of John Hunter, a great self-experimenter and
anatomist, the Four Doctors of the first faculty of Johns Hopkins
(1905), the famous painting “The Doctor” by Sir Luke Fildes (1891)
and many others with detailed descriptions.
“Doctors- The Biography of Medicine” published in 1988 is a tour
de force of the history of medicine from antiquity to modernity.
The companion book is a magnum opus with fabulous pictures, of a
large coffee table size published 20 years later. Dr. Nuland has taught
twelve lectures for the Teaching Company based on these books,
where one can listen to the eloquent and thorough knowledge of this
consummate physician-writer-medical historian on DVD or CD.
“How We Die,” published in 1994, sold over half a million copies,
won the National Book Award in 1994 and was a finalist for the
Pulitzer Prize in non-fiction in 1995. The book stimulated discussion
about end-of life care and demythologized death by maintaining
that death results from violence, disease or aging. He castigated
the futility of fighting death when it is inevitable, by use of modern
and expensive means to prolong life unnecessarily. Talking about
death with dignity, he wrote, “The dignity we seek in dying must be
found in the dignity with which we have lived our lives.” Engaged
in a debate with the “life extenders/anti-aging crowd,” he stated
matter-of-factly, “It is my debt to everything that has come before
me and it is my obligation to everything that comes after me that I
die within my allotted time.”
He was a contributing editor of The New Republic and The
American Scholar and served as a board member of the Hastings
Center. He wrote brief but very informative biographies of Moses
Maimonides, Ignac Semmelweis and Leonardo Da Vinci. LM
Note: Dr. Seyal practices Cardiovascular Diseases with Floyd
Memorial Medical Group-River Cities Cardiology.
Dr. Sherwin Nuland’s Books:
1. The Origin of Anesthesia. The