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 VERGHESEI 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.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
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According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
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How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
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Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
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She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
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I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
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As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
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If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’
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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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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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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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When you win, you often lose, that’s just a fact. There’s no currency to straighten a warped spirit, or open a closed heart, a selfish heart.
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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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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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In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE