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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.

Abraham Verghese

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Abraham Verghese
Age: 69
Born: 1955
Born: January 1
Physician
University Teacher
Writer
Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia
Exactly
Services
Sure
Denial
America
Foreign
Country
Medical
Really
Manage
Residents
Men
Degree
County
Think
Particularly
Graduates
Thinking
Degrees
Hospitals

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She had always assumed that she would have years to sort out the meaning of life... As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.
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Patients know in a heartbeat if they're getting a clumsy exam.
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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.
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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.
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I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.
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Your job is to preserve yourself, not to descend into their hole. It's a relief when you arrive at this place, the point of absurdity, because then you are free, you owe them nothing.
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The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole.
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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.
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By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.
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We know the average American physician interrupts their patient in 14 seconds.
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The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.
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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.
Abraham Verghese
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What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?
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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.
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What did it say when a man had fewer clothes than books?
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I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.
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We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We'll leave much unfinished for the next generation.
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If 'ecstasy' meant the sudden intrusion of the sacred into the ordinary, then it had just happened to me.
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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.
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The most important innovation in medicine to come in the next 10 years: the power of the human hand.
Abraham Verghese