Abraham Verghese
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.Collection: Teacher
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.Collection: Marriage
Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.Collection: Medical
We have the sense that medical students come to medicine with a great capacity to understand the suffering of patients. And then by the end of the third year they completely lose that ability, partly because we teach them the specialized language of medicine.Collection: Medical
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it - the process of learning huge volumes of information about disease, of learning a specialized language, can ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.Collection: Learning
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.Collection: Imagination
Certainly when I got to medical school, I had role models of the kind of physicians I wanted to be. I had an uncle who, looking back, was probably not the most-educated physician around, but he carried it off so well.Collection: Medical
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.Collection: Medical
Wasn't that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wantedCollection: Home
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.Collection: Heart
What we need in medical schools is not to teach empathy, as much as to preserve it. 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; empathy can be replaced by cynicism.Collection: School
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.Collection: Father
We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot. I grew up and I found my purpose and it was to become a physician. My intent wasn't to save the world as much as to heal myself. Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. but it can also deepen the wound.Collection: Believe
The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don't. If you keep saying your slippers aren't yours, then you'll die searching, you'll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.Collection: Motivational
Though I am fascinated by knowledge, I am even more fascinated by wisdom.Collection: Fascinated
You are an instrument of God. Don't leave the instrument sitting in its case, my son. Play! Leave no part of your instrument unexplored. Why settle for 'Three Blind Mice' when you can can play the 'Gloria'? No, not Bach's 'Gloria.' Yours! Your 'Gloria' lives within you. The greatest sin is not finding it, ignoring what God made possible in you.Collection: Son
The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.Collection: Motivation
In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.Collection: Writing
I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient is not by staring at the computer screen but by going to see the patient; it's only at the bedside that I can figure out what is important.Collection: Important
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.Collection: Heart
A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth.Collection: Men
You live it forward, but understand it backward.Collection: Life
We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.Collection: Average
By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.Collection: Home
I was taking care of people my age who were dying. The constant feeling, hearing from them, was that life is transient and can end very quickly, so don't postpone your dreams.Collection: Dream
Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.Collection: Destiny
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; I have been the apprentice, paid my dues, and have just become master of my ship. But when I look down, why do I see the ancient, tarred, mud-stained slippers that I buried at the start of the journey still stuck to my feet?Collection: Cancer
He was teaching me how to die, just as he'd taught me how to live.Collection: Teaching
Pray tell us, what's your favorite number?"... "Shiva jumped up to the board, uninvited, and wrote 10,213,223"... "And pray, why would this number interest us?" "It is the only number that describes itself when you read it, 'One zero, two ones, three twos, two threes'.Collection: Zero
He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him.Collection: Climbing
The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.Collection: Omission
Make something beautiful of your life.Collection: Beautiful
According to Shiva, life is in the end about fixing holes. Shiva didn't speak in metaphors. fixing holes is precisely what he did. Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession. But there's another kind of hole, and that is the wound that divides family. Sometimes this wound occurs at the moment of birth, sometimes it happens later. We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.Collection: Broken
The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.Collection: Physicians
Ignorance was just as dynamic as knowledge, and it grew in the same proportion.Collection: Ignorance
Being the first born gives you great patience.Collection: Giving
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.Collection: Dream
There is a point when grief exceeds the human capacity to emote, and as a result one is strangely composed-Collection: Grief
In an emergency, what treatment is given by ear? Words of Comfort.Collection: Comfort
To be around someone whose self-confidence is more than what our first glance led us to expect is seductive.Collection: Self Confidence
The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. Its like a cancer thats metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?Collection: Suicide
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.Collection: Thinking
We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.Collection: Broken
The only way to know where you are is by where you have just been.Collection: Way
Yesterday misspent can't be recall'd Vanity makes beauty contemptible Wisdom is more valuable than riches.Collection: Vanity
God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by--by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.Collection: Thinking
What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?Collection: Ears
We come unbidden into this life, and if we are lucky we find a purpose beyond starvation, misery, and early death which, lest we forget, is the common lot.Collection: Lucky
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.Collection: Looks
Don't Let Him Know is a rich, evocative and brilliantly told tale of family, of loyalties, and of love that must stay secret. Sandip Roy has broken new ground in this tale of the modern Indian family. A lovely readCollection: Loyalty