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;.
ABRAHAM VERGHESEThough I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.
More Abraham Verghese Quotes
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No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you.
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It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
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Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”….I met his gaze and I did not blink. “Words of comfort,” I said to my father.
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
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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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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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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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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.
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He was teaching me how to die, just as he’d taught me how to live.
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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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When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
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…guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
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At times, with today’s advances in technology, medicine in rural America looks very like it does in America’s cities, but the variety of practices is enormous.
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Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
ABRAHAM VERGHESE