Abraham Verghese Quotes

Abraham Verghese — Ethiopian Author

Abraham Verghese is a physician-author, Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University Medical School and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine. He is also the author of three best-selling books, two memoirs and a novel. In 2011, he was elected to be a member of the Institute of Medicine... (wikipedia)

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 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.

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.

I'm a great believer in geography being destiny.

The flip side of suicide is that it leaves a lingering question in the minds of the people who survived. It's like a cancer that's metastasized. The suicide is the cancer and the metastasis is all these people saying, Why? Why? Why?

Abraham Verghese Quotes

Abraham Verghese Quotes

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