Sherwin Nuland's world view, as he presents it to us in How We Die is in many ways radically different from the view of Socrates on life and death as that philosopher's perspective is presented to us by his student Plato in his Euthypro, Crito and Apology. This should in no way surprise us, for a vast difference lies between the classical, polytheistic world of Athens in the fifth century before the Christian era and the contemporary, secular world of a scientist like Nuland. The differences in their worlds and in the amount of knowledge that the two have about those worlds and in the lives of their audiences make the similarity in what they have to say about life and death even more striking. This paper explores the philosophies of the two men, looking especially at the ways in which they describe death and how the understanding that each individual brings to bear on the subject of death helps to define that person's life.
Nuland, who is a surgeon, examines the six most common causes of death in the United States (and one presumes that these are similar to the causes of death in other First World nations), including cancer, heart disease, AIDS and Alzheimer's, trauma and simple old age. One of his goals in writing this book is clearly to demystify the process of disease and of death itself. Nearly every one of us knows someone - a grandparent, a former teacher, a rabbi or priest or iman - who has died of one of these diseases. And because we know that these diseases are responsible (or will be responsible) for the deaths of many of the people that we know and probably for our own death as well, we fear them. Nuland uses that most ancient of all remedies against fear: Knowledge. By describing in detail what happens to the body in the final stages of these diseases, Nuland both forces us to come to terms with details that we may have been attempting to shelter ourselves from while also reassuring us. Most people are not interested in...