Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
ABRAHAM VERGHESECertainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEA discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWhen we cannot cure or save a life, our patients can at least feel cared for. It should be a basic human right.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEI 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 VERGHESEIf ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThat’s the funny thing about America–the blessed thing. As many people as there are to hold you back, there are angels whose humanity makes up for all the others.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWhen 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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEI’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,
ABRAHAM VERGHESENot only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESELife, 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.
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEBy visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEShe died chasing greatness and never saw it each time it was in her hand, so she kept seeking it elsewhere, but never understood the work required to get it or to keep it.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEWe have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEAs she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE