Dr. Sherwin Nuland, Author of HOW WE DIE, Dies at 83

Dr. Sherwin Nuland, author of award-winning book "How We Die," has died at age 83 of prostrate cancer at his home in Hamden, CT.

Nuland was an American surgeon and writer who taught bioethics, history of medicine, and medicine at the Yale University School of Medicine, and occasionally bioethics andhistory of medicine at Yale College. His 1994 book How We Die: Reflections on Life's Final Chapter was a 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 Rhoads Gold Medal of the American Philosophical Society, for contributions to medicine.

Nuland wrote non-academic articles for The New Yorker, The New York Times, The New Republic, Time, and the New York Review of Books. He was a fellow of the Hastings Center, an independent bioethics research institution.

Nuland was born Shepsel Ber Nudelman in The Bronx, New York City, in December 1930 to immigrant Russian Jewish parents Meyer and Vitsche Nudelman. Although raised in a traditional Orthodox Jewish home, he came to consider himself agnostic, but continued to attend synagogue.

Nuland was a graduate of The Bronx High School of Science, New York University and Yale School of Medicine, where he obtained his M.D. degree and also completed aresidency in surgery. At the time of his death, he was living in Connecticut with his second wife, Sarah. He had four children, two from each marriage. His daughter Victoria Nuland, a career foreign service officer and the former U.S. ambassador to NATO, has been the spokesperson for the Department of State since 2011.

In a 2001 TED talk, which was released in October 2007, Nuland spoke of his severe depression and obsessive thoughts in the early 1970s, probably caused by his difficult childhood and the dissolution of his first marriage. As drug therapy remained ineffective, a lobotomy was planned, but his treating resident suggested electroshock therapy instead, leading to ultimate recovery Nuland was also one of the featured lecturers at One Day University.

In 2005, Nuland produced a series of lectures for the Teaching Company on the history of Western medicine titled Doctors: The History of Scientific Medicine Revealed Through Biography.