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No matter what ailed you, you went to see the barber surgeon who wound up cupping you, bleeding you, purging you. And, oh yes, if you wanted, he would give you a haircut and pull your tooth while he was at it.
Abraham Verghese
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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Teeth
Surgeon
Went
Tooth
Give
Surgeons
Cupping
Wanted
Bleeding
Purging
Matter
Wound
Barber
Giving
Healthcare
Barbers
Would
Pull
Haircut
Wounds
Haircuts
More quotes by Abraham Verghese
No blade can puncture the human heart like the well-chosen words of a spiteful son.
Abraham Verghese
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.
Abraham Verghese
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.
Abraham Verghese
When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious.
Abraham Verghese
The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
Abraham Verghese
Life for the Italians was what it was, no more and no less, an interlude between meals
Abraham Verghese
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.
Abraham Verghese
We're losing a ritual. We're losing a ritual that I believe is transformative, transcendent, and is at the heart of the patient-physician relationship.
Abraham Verghese
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.
Abraham Verghese
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.'
Abraham Verghese
We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
Abraham Verghese
What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
Abraham Verghese
I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.
Abraham Verghese
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.
Abraham Verghese
For one who has an interest in the body as text, airports are treasure troves of information. It seems almost un-American to enjoy delays, and perhaps enjoy is not the best word, but certainly a delayed flight, if it does nothing else, allows one the opportunity to make prolonged observations about one's fellow travelers.
Abraham Verghese
Be careful! Travel expands the mind and loosens the bowels.
Abraham Verghese
How we treat the least of our brethren,... that's the measure of this country.
Abraham Verghese
...guilt leads to righteous action, but rarely is it the right action.
Abraham Verghese
Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
Abraham Verghese
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.
Abraham Verghese
