Sherwin Nuland

(1930 - 2014)

In 1994 Sherwin Nuland received the National Book Award for nonfiction for his book How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter; it sold 500,000 copies in the U.S. and was translated into seventeen languages. “My mother died of colon cancer one week after my eleventh birthday,” the surgeon and professor wrote in the preface, “and that fact has shaped my life. All that I have become and much that I have not become, I trace directly or indirectly to her death.” Nuland’s most recent book, The Soul of Medicine, was published in 2009. He died in 2014 of prostate cancer.