The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine Book

Long-time physician Sherwin B. Nuland presents a provocative and stimulating collection of stories illustrating the vagaries of medical practice over the years. Among the fascinating and probing questions that Nuland investigates are:

---What does the first Hippocratic Oath really mean?

---What happens when knowledge comes before we're ready for it?

---Why does major surgery using only acupuncture work?

---Is there really sympathy between the organs of the body?

---What happens when someone yells, "Is there a doctor in the house?" and you are the doctor?

---What goes through the mind of a heart transplant candidate who doesn't make it?

Publishers Weekly

In these essays reprinted, for the most part, from the American Scholar, Yale clinical surgery professor Nuland ponders various aspects of the practice of medicine and patient care. Opening the collection by urging his colleagues toward introspection and self-awareness, Nuland stresses that doctors make life-and-death decisions based on their own emotions, strengths, insecurities and very human needs. In another essay concerning human cloning and manipulating DNA to achieve human immortality, the author suggests we put the brakes on radical technologies whose uncertain consequences we have only begun to contemplate. On a trip to China, Nuland is intrigued by a thyroid operation performed under acupuncture where the patient was wide awake and smiling and suffered no anesthetic aftereffects after a two-and-a-half-hour excavation of her neck. Elsewhere, in an essay on grief written shortly after 9/11, Nuland calls Islamic fundamentalism "a sickness of the soul," and in the book's final entry, he himself grieves over a cardiac patient who died while waiting for a new heart. Although solid and perceptive, these essays are also occasionally flowery and verbose, and do not offer the rich insights of the author's bestselling How We Die. (May)