We aren’t even fighting disease. Its poverty. Money for food, medicines… that helps.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEAccording to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.
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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;.
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Why settle for ‘Three Blind Mice’ when you can can play the ‘Gloria’? No, not Bach’s ‘Gloria.’ Yours! Your ‘Gloria’ lives within you.
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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.
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Pray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
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Geography is destiny.
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There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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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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The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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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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When we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
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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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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life…
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I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE