What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEA rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by–by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don’t think God cares what doctrine we embrace.
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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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…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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I’ve had my share of angels.
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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
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Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
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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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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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I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,
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This is my life, I thought…I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil
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Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
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Another day in paradise’ was his inevitable pronouncement when he settled his head on his pillow. Now I understand what that meant: the uneventful day was a precious gift.
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Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.
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When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.
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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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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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By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
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I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?
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He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
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You are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. .
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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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If seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
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For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE