Sherwin Nuland, a physician, professor and best-selling author, will relay his experiences working with tsunami victims in Sri Lanka for the Assembly Series at 11 a.m. March 23 in Graham Chapel. His talk is called “Tsunami Medical Diary.”
A prolific writer on a variety of topics, Nuland is best-known for his book How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. In it, he argues that a “mythologized” image of death leaves the terminally ill and their loved ones unable to cope with the difficulties they face.
Drawing on his knowledge of death both from his work as a physician and from his own losses, Nuland attempts to dispel the cloud of fear and mystery surrounding death. How We Die won the National Book Award, was a finalist for the 1995 Pulitzer Prize and Book Critics Circle Award, and spent 34 weeks on The New York Times’ best-seller list, selling more than a half-million copies.
Nuland is a clinical professor of surgery at Yale University School of Medicine, where he teaches bioethics and medical history.
In addition to How We Die, he has written several other books, among them: Doctors: The Biography of Medicine; The Doctors’ Plague: Germs, Childbed Fever, and the Strange Story of Ignac Semmelweis; and Lost in America: A Journey With My Father, an autobiographical work that recounts his poverty-stricken childhood in the Bronx and experience with depression.
Nuland also writes features for The New Yorker, Time, The New York Times and other major publications. He serves as literary editor for Connecticut Medicine and chairs the board of managers for the Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences.
Assembly Series lectures are free and open to the public. For more information, go online to assemblyseries.wustl.edu or call 935-4620.