Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEStudents undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
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I always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
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We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
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How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
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Life, too, is like that. You live it forward, but understand it backward. It is only when you stop and look to the rear that you see the corpse caught under your wheel.
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No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
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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.
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I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it’s only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.
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He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
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Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.
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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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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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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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Empathy can be replaced by cynicism.
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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