We’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 VERGHESEI had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
There 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 VERGHESE -
She 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 VERGHESE -
I believe in black holes. I believe that as the universe empties into nothingness, past and future will smack together in the last swirl around the drain.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
You are an instrument of God. Don’t leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. .
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
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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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She felt the familiar calmness of an emergency, but she understood the falseness of that feeling, now that it was her life at stake.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I think America is really in denial about the degree to which residents, particularly foreign medical graduates, man the county hospitals of this country, and but for their services, I’m not sure how exactly we could manage.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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?’ ‘
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE