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A Doctor's 'Soul' is Tormented By Medical Errors

For his new book, The Soul of Medicine, author Sherwin Nuland asked doctors to tell him about their most memorable patients.

Rather than tout the medical conundrums they’ve solved or the lives they’ve saved, some shared tales about patients whom lay readers might think they’d most like to forget:

There’s the elderly Holocaust survivor who reluctantly agrees to have surgery for removal of a cancerous colon polyp, only to die three days later from a complication of the operation.

There’s the obese accountant who almost bleeds to death when a surgeon slashes his aorta during gallbladder surgery.

And there’s the Polish immigrant who, two years after getting a kidney transplant, dies from a side effect of his anti-rejection medication.

“Nuland shows that even extraordinary doctors make mistakes,” says physician/author Kenneth Ludmerer, an internist who is a professor of both medicine and history at Washington University in St. Louis. “As one sign of their professionalism, these physicians not only learn from their errors but remain haunted by them for the rest of their lives. In this sense, some doctors become the ‘second victims’ of medical errors,” he says in an e-mail.

Nuland says he’s not surprised that some doctors cited failures as their most memorable cases.

“In modern medicine, we don’t fail very much,” says the author, who stopped seeing patients when he started writing How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter, the best seller for which he won the National Book Award in 1994. “So failures tend to be very complex. You discuss them with colleagues, trying to figure out what the hell went wrong.”