We’re losing a ritual. We’re losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…
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In America, we have always taken it as an article of faith that we ‘battle’ cancer; we attack it with knives, we poison it with chemotherapy or we blast it with radiation.
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I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don’t postpone your dreams.
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It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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We must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.
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Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.
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I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.
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At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.
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I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.
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I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn’t change them. That hurt.
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My sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE