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 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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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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Still, it’s an apt metaphor for our profession. But there’s another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
A rich man’s faults are covered with money, but a surgeon’s faults are covered with earth.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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 -
Geography is destiny.
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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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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?’ ‘
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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;.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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?
ABRAHAM VERGHESE