Sherwin B. Nuland

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The life sciences contain spiritual values which can never be explained by the materialistic attitude of present day science

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In the community of living tissues, the uncontrolled mob of misfits that is cancer behaves like a gang of perpetually wilding adolescents. They are the juvenile delinquents of cellular society

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That enormously complex biological interactions are so flawlessly coordinated as to result in such obvious manifestations as human thought or the electrical activity that dries the heartbeat is as exciting to me -- actually more exciting -- than such phenomena were when I was a small boy and thought them divinely (in the supernatural sense) driven

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Though everyone may yearn for a tranquil death, the basic instinct to stay alive is a far more powerful force

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my patient needed a great deal of reassurance that there had been nothing unusual about the way her mother died, that she had not done something wrong to prevent her mother from experiencing that "spiritual" death with dignity that she had anticipated. All of her efforts and expectations had been in vain, and now this very intelligent woman was in despair. I tried to make clear to her that the belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and society's, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying person's humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die