We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWhen 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?’ ‘
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
A beautiful literary collection that tells of today’s country doctor, somewhat removed from our romantic black-bag image of days gone by, but still fulfilling an essential need in caring for spread-out populations.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we could manage.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…
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 -
What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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 -
We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
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