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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEA discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Being the first born gives you great patience.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Yesterday misspent can’t be recall’d Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Don’t Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
If seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
That’s the funny thing about America–the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It’s a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
ABRAHAM VERGHESE