What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe 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.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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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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If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
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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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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
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When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘
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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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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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It was all I had, all I’ve ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
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Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.
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The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely read
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I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
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I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
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She died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.
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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.
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They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
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The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
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Make something beautiful of your life.
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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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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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If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
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Being the first born gives you great patience.
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