Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEAt 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.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
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I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
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Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.
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The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice.
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There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
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Being the first born gives you great patience.
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Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
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The process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialised language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve;.
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We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.
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As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
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My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they’ll leave in people’s hearts.
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And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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And pray, why would this number interest us?” “It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, ‘One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes’.
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE