Product Description

Having won the National Book Award for How We Die, his best-selling inquiry into the causes and modes of death, Sherwin Nuland now turns his attention to the miraculous resiliency of human life.  For this lucid, wonderful, and wonder-filled new book explores the body's mysterious capacity to marshal disparate organs and processes in the interests of survival.

Like its predecessor, How We Live is filled with gripping medical case histories: a woman is pulled back from the brink of death from inexplicable internal bleeding; another patient triumphs over breast cancer; the "routine" removal of a polyp triggers a nearly lethal medical crisis.  For Nuland, each of these cases serves to illustrate the extraordinary responsiveness and adaptability of the human organism.  We learn how the aorta's baroreceptors monitor blood pressure and respond to its minutest fluctuations.  We follow the intricate chain of electrochemical command that makes us leap out of the path of a speeding car. We discover why the stomach--which is capable of breaking down everything from porridge to pizza--refrains from digesting itself.  Informed by sympathy for human suffering and an erudition that includes poetry and the Talmud as well as the medical canon, How We Live is science writing of the rarest kind--lucid, poetic, and genuinely uplifting.

Originally published under the title The Wisdom of the Body

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #227156 in Books
• Published on: 1998-05-26
• Released on: 1998-05-26
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 8.00" h x .90" w x 5.10" l, .65 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 432 pages

From Amazon.com
After he won the National Book Award for How We Die, physician and popular medical writer Sherwin Nuland noticed that book critics kept referring to his next book, The Wisdom of the Body, as How We Live. Rather than fight the tide, he embraced the nickname and reissued the book. How We Live is a fascinating examination of the machinery of life. Dr. Nuland begins his meditation with a hair-raising account of a medical emergency that nearly ends in disaster: a 40-year-old woman almost bleeds to death on the operating table as he and other doctors struggle frantically to find the source of the hemorrhage. Eventually, Dr. Nuland and his team are able to locate the cause--a rare aneurysm of the splenic artery--and repair it. The patient survives. How We Live, Dr. Nuland tells us, grew out of the experiences of that night and his certainty that Marge Hanson lived because of her own will and the surgical team's will not to let her die. That "will to live" is what Dr. Nuland calls the Human Spirit, and spirit is very much a part of the body's wisdom.

Each chapter of How We Live focuses on a different biological function, from the work of the lymph nodes to the process of pregnancy and birth. The heart, the nervous and digestive systems, the sex organs, and the brain are all explored and commented on with clarity and grace. But Dr. Nuland is not content with merely providing an operating manual for the body. He is in a constant state of wonder at what a miraculous and mysterious thing the body is: a dynamic system of parts all working in concert, infused with that fierce, intangible quality--the human spirit.

From Library Journal
In this engrossing book, Nuland, author of the prize-winning How We Die, has turned his medical knowledge to the wonder of life. He offers a lucid anatomical and physiological tour of the human body, from cells and DNA to tissues and organs, reinforcing the sense of wonder with strategic case studies from his medical experience at Yale Medical School. Interspersed throughout is a discussion of the gnawing issue of what constitutes the mystery of life: How do biochemical interactions explain the quintessence of Homo sapiens? Nuland presents a formidable set of scientific facts and gives us much to ponder concerning our spirituality. Highly recommended.
-?James Swanton, Harlem Hosp. Lib., New York
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Having won the National Book Award for How We Die (1995), Nuland, humane physician and practical individual, now writes about life. So doing, he also pursues nothing less than the human spirit, which impels many persons' most admirable activities, although they may have little or nothing to do with survival. Nuland glories in the developments that brought Homo sapiens to the present stage. He considers body systems and human processes, dealing with each historically and scientifically and then bringing it to life in a detailed patient history--and the word patient, not the usual case, is apt here, for Nuland--his own patients are fortunate indeed in having him as their physician--sees living, feeling persons, not diseases, and treats them accordingly (gentleness, he points out, is necessary in dealing not only with the patient but also with himself as physician). The body, Nuland sums up, achieves its stability through being unstable. This book, a prizewinner whether or not it actually wins one, conveys much information, discusses philosophical and social questions open-mindedly, and delights us withal, thanks to Nuland's dry sense of humor. William Beatty