The celebrated writer-physician Sherwin B. Nuland ”” a clinical professor of surgery at Yale, the author of nine previous books, the winner of the National Book Award ”” is a believer in miracles. Not the parting-of-the-Red-Sea kind of miracles that suspend physical laws, but phenomena and events that can’t be explained by current scientific knowledge, and perhaps never will be.
In “The Uncertain Art: Thoughts on a Life in Medicine,” a delightful, companionable collection of occasional articles almost all of which appeared in The American Scholar magazine, Dr. Nuland feels free to follow his interests where they lead him ”” into medical history, etymology, even art criticism. He writes about the joy of exercising, the grief of 9/11, the satisfaction of authorship, the pain of losing a cherished friend. But the most engaging and thought-provoking articles deal with subjects that are mysterious, unsettling.
These pieces can be enjoyed for the simple sci-fi pleasure of encountering the inexplicable. Dr. Nuland, however, has a larger purpose in mind: to undermine smug certainties about modern science. By emphasizing the extraordinary he seeks to challenge his profession’s often unreflective reliance on technology and restore the doctor-patient relationship, the touchy-feely human connection, to the center of medical practice.
Doctors, he insists, have to be more than technicians. They should be, first of all, humanists, intuitionists, appreciative of each patient’s individuality and particular situation, practitioners of a quirky, unpredictable, uncertain art. True healers understand this. “To become comfortable with uncertainty,” Dr. Nuland writes, “is one of the primary goals in the training of a physician.”