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 VERGHESEPray tell us, what’s your favorite number?”… “Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223″… “
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you
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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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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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I’ve always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America,
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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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What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it.
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Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
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What we are fighting isn’t godlessness–this is the most godly country on earth.
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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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Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
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I 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.
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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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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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We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
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…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE