Citizenship American Name Sherwin Nuland | Children Victoria Nuland | |
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Born Shepsel Ber NudelmanDecember 8, 1930The Bronx, New York, USA ( 1930-12-08 ) Fields Surgeon, writer, educator Alma mater Bronx High School of ScienceNew York UniversityYale School of Medicine Known for How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter Notable awards 1994 National Book Award Spouse Sarah Nuland (m. 1977–2014) Parents Meyer Nudelman, Vitsche Nudelman Books How We Die: Reflectio, Doctors: The Biograph, The Art of Aging: A Doctor's, Lost in America, The Doctors' Plague Similar People Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan, Robert Pinsky, Donald Kagan | ||
Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland interview (2000)
Sherwin Bernard Nuland (born Shepsel Ber Nudelman; December 8, 1930 – March 3, 2014) was an American surgeon and writer who taught bioethics, history of medicine, and medicine at the Yale School of Medicine, and occasionally bioethics and history of medicine at Yale College. His 1994 book How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter was a New York Times Best Seller and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
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In 2011 Nuland was awarded the Jonathan Rhoads Gold Medal of the American Philosophical Society, for “Distinguished Service to Medicine.”
Nuland wrote non-academic articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, Time, MIT Technology Review and the New York Review of Books. He was a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.
Biography
Nuland was born Shepsel Ber Nudelman in The Bronx, New York City, on December 8, 1930, to immigrant Ukrainian Jewish parents Meyer (a garment repairman) and Vitsche Nudelman.
Although raised in a traditional Orthodox Jewish home, he came to consider himself agnostic, but continued to attend synagogue. As a Lithuanian Jew, he witnessed anti-Semitic discrimination against his cousin and changed his name when he applied to college to ensure admittance.
Nuland was a graduate of The Bronx High School of Science, New York University and Yale School of Medicine, where he obtained his M.D. degree and also completed a residency in surgery.
At the time of his death, he was living in Connecticut with his second wife, Sarah Nuland (née Peterson). He had four children, two from each marriage. His daughter Victoria Nuland, a career foreign service officer and the former U.S. ambassador to NATO and former spokesperson for the Department of State, was appointed Assistant Secretary, Bureau of European and Eurasian Affairs in September, 2013.
Dr. Nuland avowed a “unique relationship” with death. The 1994 National Book Award for nonfiction was granted to his How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter.
In a 2001 TED talk, which was released in October 2007, Nuland spoke of his severe depression and obsessive thoughts in the early 1970s, probably caused by his difficult childhood and the dissolution of his first marriage. As drug therapy remained ineffective, a lobotomy was suggested, but his treating resident suggested electroshock therapy instead, which led to his recovery. Twelve years after the talk, TED’s Curator, Chris Anderson, recalled that Nuland's talk “remains one of the most powerful moments in the conference’s history.”
Nuland was also one of the featured lecturers at One Day University.
In 2005, Nuland produced a series of lectures for the Teaching Company’s The Great Courses on the history of Western medicine titled Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography.
Nuland died on March 3, 2014, at his home in Hamden, Connecticut, of prostate cancer.