Abraham Verghese Quotes

Lets take away the incentives to do 'to' patients and instead create incentives to do 'for' patients, to be 'with' patients. We don't need to do comparative effectiveness trials to see if that works; we can just ask patients.
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.
Medicine may be the lens through which I see the world, but since I think of medicine as 'life +', a place where life is exaggerated and seen at its most vital and poignant, I'll be writing about life more than I will be writing about medicine.
Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it's still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life.
Modern society has evolved to the point where we counter the old-fashioned fatalism surrounding the word 'cancer' by embracing the idea of the Uber-mind - that our will possesses nearly supernatural powers.
My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.
My deceased patients have taught me over the years to believe in the glass half full, to make good use of the time we have, to be generous - that was their lesson for the Uber-mind, and it was free. 'Do that,' they said, 'and then perhaps death shall have no dominion.'
My desire to be a physician had a lot to do with that sense of medicine as a ministry of healing, not just a science. And not even just a science and an art, but also a calling, also a ministry.
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.
My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments.
Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.
Rituals, anthropologists will tell us, are about transformation. The rituals we use for marriage, baptism or inaugurating a president are as elaborate as they are because we associate the ritual with a major life passage, the crossing of a critical threshold, or in other words, with transformation.
So I consider myself a dog person. Kind of. Had dogs when I was a kid, but my parents would never have dreamed of having them in the house.
Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.
The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?
The incredible cinematography makes 'A Walk to Beautiful' almost like a poem; there is a tenderness on display that seems to emanate from the camera. There is also great sensitivity to the women whose stories are being told - never did I have a sense of the subjects being exploited.
There are moments as a teacher when I'm conscious that I'm trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. 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.
There is that lovely feeling of one reader telling another, 'You must read this.' I've always wanted to write a book like that, with the sense that you are contributing to the discourse in middle America, a discourse that begins at a book club in a living room, but then spreads. That is meaningful to me.
There's something universal about illness... Whether you like it, at some level all patients are saying, 'Daddy, Mommy, help me, tell me it's going to be alright.'
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