I’m a great believer in geography being destiny.
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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Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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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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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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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.
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My 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.
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This is my life, I thought…I have excised the cancer from my past, cut it out; I have crossed the high plains, descended into the desert, traversed oceans, and planted my feet in new soil
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In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
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It’s an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.
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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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Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.
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I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
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In 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.
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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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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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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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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
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According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn’t speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did.
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I’ve had my share of angels.
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We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.
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If ‘ecstasy’ meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
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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.
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I love to read poetry but I haven’t written anything that I’m willing to show anybody.
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