Sherwin B. Nuland

Long regarded as central to the contemporary understanding of medical ethics are four principles that must be satisfied in order to fulfill the requirements of moral decision-making. These principles are autonomy, justice, beneficence, and non-maleficence.

The Scientific Revolution, that remarkable transformation of European thought that occurred between approximately 1550 and 1700, brought with it an ascendancy of the experimental method and the refusal to believe any explanation of natural phenomena that could not be proven to the satisfaction of the empirical observer.

You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body.

I have been following the attempt to initiate or revamp federal involvement in the health of Americans since it was a major topic for my high school debating team in 1947.

Whether wisely or not, one of the first priorities of the incoming Obama administration was to present a package of healthcare benefits, which, to no one's surprise, produced an uproar in Congress and an assortment of polls declaring that the majority of Americans were opposed to it.

Though President George W. Bush made some small noises about his intention to present some form of improved health coverage, nothing grew out of them.

There is, to be sure, sometimes only a small difference between being alert to possible danger and allowing oneself to become terrified to the point of paralysis by seeming or imagined portents.

Though moral axioms to guide the conduct of the practitioner have existed since the beginnings of the profession of healing, Western doctors are most likely to view the Hippocratic Oath of approximately two-and-a-half millennia ago as the first codified set of statements to which they can look for guidance.

There are resurrection themes in every society that has ever been studied, and it is because not just only do we fantasize about the possibility of resurrection and recovery, but it actually happens. And it happens a lot.

Once the notion of depression had begun to dominate the diagnostic armamentarium, it became but a matter of time before patients with relatively mild disorders of mood or anxiety would be entered into it.

Death belongs to the dying and those who love them.

I was, in the 1960s, in a marriage. To use the word 'bad' would be perhaps the understatement of the year. It was dreadful.