Quotes by Abraham Verghese

[American ambulance crews] salvaged people wed never see in Missing, because no one would have tied to bring them to a hospital. Judging someone to be beyond help never crossed the minds of police, firemen, or doctors here.

We stopped you from going, didnt we? Me and Shiva. Our birth?Dont be silly. Can you imagine me giving up this? he said sweeping his hand to indicate family, Missing, the home hed made out of a bungalow. Ive been blessed. My genius was to know long ago that money alone wouldnt make me happy. Or maybe thats my excuse for not leaving you a huge fortune! I certainly could have made more money if that had been my goal. But one thing I wont have is regrets. My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness theyll leave in peoples hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.Of course, you and I have seen countless deaths among the poor. Their only regret surely is being born poor, suffering from birth to death. You know, in the book of Job, Job says to God, You shouldve taken me straight from the womb to the tomb! Why the in-between part, why life, if it was just to suffer? Something like that. For the poor, death is at least the end of suffering.

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.

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.

There are moments as a teacher when Im conscious that Im trotting out the same exact phrase my professor used with me years ago. Its an eerie feeling, as if my old mentor is not just in the room, but in my shoes, using me as his mouthpiece.

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.

Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.

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.

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.

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, Im not sure how exactly we could manage.

The bottom line: health care reform is about the patient, not about the physician.

Ive never bought this idea of taking a therapeutic distance. If I see a student or house staff cry, I take great faith in that. Thats a great person; theyre going to be a great doctor.

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.

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.

I love to read poetry but I havent written anything that Im willing to show anybody.

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.