I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
ABRAHAM VERGHESENo matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Literature is a beautiful way of keeping the imagination alive, of visiting worlds you would never have time to in your day-to-day life. It keeps you abreast of a wider spectrum of human activities.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The Country Doctor Revisited captures the trials and tribulations of medicine, but also the satisfaction and the extraordinary rewards that come to those who embrace such a practice.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I joke, but I only half joke, that if you come to one of our hospitals missing a limb, no one will believe you till they get a CAT scan, MRI, or orthopedic consult.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
You live it forward, but understand it backward.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE