Sherwin B. Nuland Quote
It is probably a universal teaching of all cultures that putting a name to a demon helps to decrease its fearsomeness. I sometimes wonder whether the real, perhaps culturally subconscious, reason that medical pioneers have always sought to identify and classify specific diseases is less to understand than to beard them. Confrontation, somehow, is safer once we have set a label on a thing, as if the very process makes the beast sit still for a while and appear susceptible to taming; it puts under some element of control what has previously been a wilderness of unrestrained terror. When we give sickness a name, we civilize it—we make it play the game by our own rules. Naming a disease is the first step in organizing against it.
Sherwin B. Nuland
It is probably a universal teaching of all cultures that putting a name to a demon helps to decrease its fearsomeness. I sometimes wonder whether the real, perhaps culturally subconscious, reason that medical pioneers have always sought to identify and classify specific diseases is less to understand than to beard them. Confrontation, somehow, is safer once we have set a label on a thing, as if the very process makes the beast sit still for a while and appear susceptible to taming; it puts under some element of control what has previously been a wilderness of unrestrained terror. When we give sickness a name, we civilize it—we make it play the game by our own rules. Naming a disease is the first step in organizing against it.
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About Sherwin B. Nuland
New York Times Best Seller and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction, as well as being a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.
In 2011 Nuland was awarded the Jonathan Rhoads Gold Medal of the American Philosophical Society, for “Distinguished Service to Medicine.”
Nuland wrote non-academic articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, Time, MIT Technology Review and the New York Review of Books. He was a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.
He is the father of Victoria Nuland, who served as under secretary of State for Political Affairs from 2021 to 2024.