OverDrive would like to use cookies to store information on your computer to improve your user experience at our Website. One of the cookies we use is critical for certain aspects of the site to operate and has already been set. You may delete and block all cookies from this site, but this could affect certain features or services of the site. To find out more about the cookies we use and how to delete them, click here to see our Privacy Policy.
“Life is short, and the Art so long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious; and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and the externals, cooperate.” –attributed to Hippocrates, c. 400 B.C.E. The award-winning author of How We Die and The Art of Aging, venerated physician Sherwin B. Nuland has now written his most thoughtful and engaging book. The Uncertain Art is a superb collection of essays about the vital mix of expertise, intuition, sound judgment, and pure chance that plays a part in a doctor’s practice and life. Drawing from history, the recent past, and his own life, Nuland weaves a tapestry of compelling stories in which doctors have had to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Topics include the primitive (and sometimes illegal) procedures doctors once practiced with good intentions, such as grave robbing and prescribing cocaine as an anesthetic (which resulted in a physician becoming America’s first cocaine addict); the curious “cures” for irregularity touted by people from the ancient Egyptians to the cereal titan John Harvey Kellogg and bodybuilder Charles Atlas; and healers grappling with today’s complex moral and ethical quandaries, from cloning to gene therapy to the adoption of Eastern practices like acupuncture. Nuland also recounts his most dramatic experiences in a forty-year medical career: the time he was called out of the audience of a Broadway play to help a man having a heart attack (when no other doctor there would respond), and how he formed a profound friendship with an unforgettable–and doomed–heart patient. Behind these inspiring accounts always lie the mysteries of the human body and human nature, the manner in which the ill can will themselves back to health and the odd and essential interactions between a body’s own healing mechanisms and a doctor’s prescriptions. Riveting and wise, amusing and heartrending, The Uncertain Art is Sherwin Nuland’s best work, gems from a man who has spent his professional life acting in the face of ambiguity and sharing what he has learned.
“Life is short, and the Art so long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious; and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and the externals, cooperate.” –attributed to Hippocrates, c. 400 B.C.E. The award-winning author of How We Die and The Art of Aging, venerated physician Sherwin B. Nuland has now written his most thoughtful and engaging book. The Uncertain Art is a superb collection of essays about the vital mix of expertise, intuition, sound judgment, and pure chance that plays a part in a doctor’s practice and life. Drawing from history, the recent past, and his own life, Nuland weaves a tapestry of compelling stories in which doctors have had to make decisions in the face of uncertainty. Topics include the primitive (and sometimes illegal) procedures doctors once practiced with good intentions, such as grave robbing and prescribing cocaine as an anesthetic (which resulted in a physician becoming America’s first cocaine addict); the curious “cures” for irregularity touted by people from the ancient Egyptians to the cereal titan John Harvey Kellogg and bodybuilder Charles Atlas; and healers grappling with today’s complex moral and ethical quandaries, from cloning to gene therapy to the adoption of Eastern practices like acupuncture. Nuland also recounts his most dramatic experiences in a forty-year medical career: the time he was called out of the audience of a Broadway play to help a man having a heart attack (when no other doctor there would respond), and how he formed a profound friendship with an unforgettable–and doomed–heart patient. Behind these inspiring accounts always lie the mysteries of the human body and human nature, the manner in which the ill can will themselves back to health and the odd and essential interactions between a body’s own healing mechanisms and a doctor’s prescriptions. Riveting and wise, amusing and heartrending, The Uncertain Art is Sherwin Nuland’s best work, gems from a man who has spent his professional life acting in the face of ambiguity and sharing what he has learned.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
THE WHOLE LAW OF MEDICINE
Life is short, and the Art is long; the occasion fleeting; experience fallacious, and judgment difficult. The physician must not only be prepared to do what is right himself, but also to make the patient, the attendants, and the externals, cooperate.
The First Aphorism
attributed to hippocrates, c. 400 b.c.e.
It has long been accepted that a considerable portion of the body of writings credited to Hippocrates was in fact authored by others, in the two centuries following his death. But until recent decades, scholars remained convinced that reliable criteria were recognizable by which at least a certain core of the material might still be identified as his own. They set this group of texts off from the rest by calling it “The Genuine Works of Hippocrates.”
English translations of these central teachings were inadequate and incomplete until the mid-nineteenth century, when the Sydenham Society of London commissioned the Scottish surgeon Francis Adams to provide a definitive edition. Published in 1849, the two-volume result of Adams’s efforts—naturally called The Genuine Works of Hippocrates—took its place as the authentic historic record.
During the last century, cracks began to appear in the supposed evidence by which some of even these “genuine” works had been certified into the canon, but the short book of pithy clinical maxims known as The Aphorisms held out longer than most. As recently as 1934, members of America’s first think tank of medical historians, based at Johns Hopkins University, could write in their Bulletin: “It is almost universally agreed that among the many Hippocratic writings, the Aphorisms are genuine.” The editors of the journal then went on to point out something that remains true to this day: “They are also undoubtedly by far the most popular books; printed, translated, and commented upon endless times, they were the physician’s bible for many centuries.” And in a little aside, they added the surprising—at least to me—statement that the introduction into English of the very word “aphorism” is owed to this “anthology of medical truths.”
Nowadays, finding a historian who agrees that The Aphorisms was actually written by the legendary Father of Medicine is as unlikely as finding a clinical physician who agrees that all of the 422 nuggets of advice contained in its pages are “medical truths.” Though enshrined in the tradition of almost two and a half millennia as the First Aphorism of Hippocrates, the words of this chapter’s epigraph, for example, were probably never uttered by their putative author. A few reasonably dependable bits of information are known about the great man’s life: he was born about 460 b.c.e. on the Greek island of Cos; he was probably an itinerant physician; he seems to have been a leader in the formation of a school for the training of young doctors. We know little more than that, and what we do know most assuredly does not include hard evidence that Hippocrates left any identifiable corpus of written work. As for the clinical pearls of wisdom: although some of them are nothing less than astonishing in the accuracy of their perceptiveness and the wisdom of their recommendations, others are so bewilderingly at odds with simple observation that they seem to have been inserted to keep the reader awake by making him laugh. What, for example, is a doctor to do with such pronouncements as “The bald are not subject to varicose veins” and “Stammerers are particularly liable to obstinate diarrhea”?
All...
About the Author-
A clinical professor of surgery at Yale University, Sherwin B. Nuland is the author of numerous books, including The Art of Aging: A Doctor’s Prescription for Well-Being; How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, which won the National Book Award; Lost in America: A Journey with My Father; Maimonides; and Leonardo da Vinci. He lives in Connecticut.
Reviews-
March 17, 2008 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 .
April 15, 2008 These essays, whichNuland wrotefrom 1998 through 2004 forthe American Scholar, make up a less-unified book than his gripping and powerful How We Die (1994) and The Mysteries Within (2000), each chapter of which proceeds from a particular incident in his surgical career. But then, these pieces range of topics is greater, their expositional mainsprings less intimate. Two chapters impressively ponder the first sentence of the first aphorism of Hippocrates, which begins, Life is short, and the Arti.e., medicine is long. Others engrossingly discuss the placebo effect, acupuncture during surgery, Grave Robbing, electroconvulsive therapy, three classic medical texts, and Thomas Eakins two great paintings of surgical teaching. Personal experience powers amusing as well as informative pieces on weight training by the elderly (this could be an outtake from The Art of Aging, 2007), writing, and actually responding to the call for a doctor in the house. Oddly, the most personal chapter, first published herein, is the least successful; about a heart-transplant candidate Nuland befriended, it is, atypically for Nuland, insufficiently emotionally distanced.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2008, American Library Association.)
Title Information+
Publisher
Random House Publishing Group
OverDrive Read
Release date:
EPUB eBook
Release date:
Digital Rights Information+
Copyright Protection (DRM) required by the Publisher may be applied to this title to limit or prohibit printing or copying. File sharing or redistribution is prohibited. Your rights to access this material expire at the end of the lending period. Please see Important Notice about Copyrighted Materials for terms applicable to this content.
Please update to the latest version of the OverDrive app to stream videos.
Device Compatibility Notice
The OverDrive app is required for this format on your current device.
Bahrain, Egypt, Hong Kong, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Palestine, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the Sudan, the Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen
You've reached your library's checkout limit for digital titles.
To make room for more checkouts, you may be able to return titles from your Checkouts page.
Excessive Checkout Limit Reached.
There have been too many titles checked out and returned by your account within a short period of time.
Try again in several days. If you are still not able to check out titles after 7 days, please contact Support.
You have already checked out this title. To access it, return to your Checkouts page.
This title is not available for your card type. If you think this is an error contact support.
There are no copies of this issue left to borrow. Please try to borrow this title again when a new issue is released.
| Sign In
You will be prompted to sign into your library account on the next page.
If this is your first time selecting “Send to NOOK,” you will then be taken to a Barnes & Noble page to sign into (or create) your NOOK account. You should only have to sign into your NOOK account once to link it to your library account. After this one-time step, periodicals will be automatically sent to your NOOK account when you select "Send to NOOK."
The first time you select “Send to NOOK,” you will be taken to a Barnes & Noble page to sign into (or create) your NOOK account. You should only have to sign into your NOOK account once to link it to your library account. After this one-time step, periodicals will be automatically sent to your NOOK account when you select "Send to NOOK."
You can read periodicals on any NOOK tablet or in the free NOOK reading app for iOS, Android or Windows 8.
