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 VERGHESEWe 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.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
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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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A discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
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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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Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
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Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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I’ve had my share of angels.
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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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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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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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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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I think we learn from medicine everywhere that it is, at its heart, a human endeavor, requiring good science but also a limitless curiosity and interest in your fellow human being, and that the physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.
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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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE