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 VERGHESEWe’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.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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My intent wasn’t to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession
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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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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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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 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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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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Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
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No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
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I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net.
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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.
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You live it forward, but understand it backward.
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I’ve had my share of angels.
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If seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight
ABRAHAM VERGHESE