Top 33 Abraham Verghese Quotes

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

When you have a natural genetic tan developed over centuries and many generations, the idea of soaking up rays by the pool has never made sense.

I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine – eight to 12 hours, and even more in the early days.

Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.

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.

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.’

I think legislation needs to put an end to doctors profiting on businesses to which they can funnel patients – that is business, not medicine. If you try to call it medicine, then it is corruption. Without legislation, it will keep happening.

I’m a proud American – becoming a citizen in 1988 was one of the most profoundly moving occasions in my life; I’m a former Texan and a recent Californian.

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.

I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient whose care I am taking over 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.

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.

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.’

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.

I’m the first to admit that the resolution of a hand feeling the belly doesn’t compare with the resolution of a CAT scan scanning the belly, but only my hand can say that it hurts at this spot and not at this spot. Only my hand can say that.

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.

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

Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer.

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.

We’re now able to show that the words of comfort trigger biological reactions which are the very things that you want, and you can use drugs to get there, or you can use words of comfort to get there, which would make your drugs so much more effective.

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.

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.

By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.

As a young physician in the mid-’80s, caring for people who had contracted H.I.V., I lost two of my patients to suicide at a time when the virus was doing very little harm to them. I have always thought of them as having been killed by a metaphor, by the burden of secrecy and shame associated with the disease.

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.

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. If we are fortunate, we ‘beat’ the cancer. If not, we are posthumously praised for having ‘succumbed after a long battle.’

I think we can see how blessed we are in America to have access to the kind of health care we do if we are insured, and even if uninsured, how there is a safety net. Now, as to the problem of how much health care costs and how we reform health care … it is another story altogether.

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.

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.

You can’t show up at the bedside and then turn on your skills. You have to keep your game sharp all the time.

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.

In writing, as in medicine, there are no short cuts. You need stamina.

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 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.