Abraham Verghese Quotes

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

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

Abraham Verghese

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after yo...

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after yo...

Abraham Verghese

Tags: courage, death, foreword, life, when breath becomes air, writing

About Author

Abraham Verghese (born 1955) is an American physician, author and Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice Chair of Education at Stanford University Medical School. He is the author of four best-selling books: two memoirs and two novels. In 2011, he was elected to be a member of the Institute of Medicine. He received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015. He is the co-host with Eric Topol of the podcast Medscape Medicine and the Machine.

Abraham Verghese Quotes

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

Be ready. Be seated. See what courage sounds like. See how brave it is to reveal yourself in this way. But above all, see what it is to still live, to profoundly influence the lives of others after yo...

About Author

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...

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...

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 carrie...

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 p...

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

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've never bought this idea of taking a therapeutic distance. If I see a student or house staff cry, I take great faith in that. That's a great person; they're going to be a great doctor.

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 ironical...

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

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...

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, b...

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 physic...

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.

Years later, when Idi Amin said and did outrageous things, I understood that his motivation was to rattle the good people of Greenwich mean time, have them raise their heads from their tea and scones,...

It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory." p 380

God will judge us by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.