To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
ABRAHAM VERGHESETo be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.
ABRAHAM VERGHESECertainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
ABRAHAM VERGHESENot only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEI always wondered if the good people who send us bibles really think that hookworm and hunger are healed by scripture? Our patients are illiterate.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEHe had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.
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 VERGHESEBe careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThere are moments as a teacher when I’m conscious that I’m trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEMy sense is that the wonderful technology that we have to visualize the inside of the body often leaves physicians feeling that the exam is a waste of time and so they may shortchange the ritual.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEA discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIn 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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEHe was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThe only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEIn an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE