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. Abraham Verghese Read Quote
My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one’s fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments. Abraham Verghese Read Quote
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 Read Quote
By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure. Abraham Verghese Read Quote
Medicine, you see, is my first love; whether I write fiction or nonfiction, and even when it has nothing to do with medicine, it’s still about medicine. After all, what is medicine but life plus? So I write about life. Abraham Verghese Read Quote
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. Abraham Verghese Read Quote
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. Abraham Verghese Read Quote
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 ironically make one lose sight of the patient one came to serve; empathy can be replaced by cynicism. Abraham Verghese Read Quote
Medicine may be the lens through which I see the world, but since I think of medicine as ‘life +’, a place where life is exaggerated and seen at its most vital and poignant, I’ll be writing about life more than I will be writing about medicine. Abraham Verghese Read Quote
