We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients.
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
-
-
In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
Geography is destiny.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I 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 VERGHESE -
I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around but he carried it off so well.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
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.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
I was angry with myself because I still loved her, or at least I loved that dream of our togetherness. My feelings were unreasonable, irrational, and I couldn’t change them. That hurt.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
How we treat the least of our brethren,… that’s the measure of this country.
ABRAHAM VERGHESE -
If it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one’s fellow travelers.
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 -
And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.
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 -
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
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