Submission by: Kwabena Adubofour, MD
Back in a 2009 interview this is what Journalist Susan Cohen wrote about Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP :
“Verghese believes in the curative power of literature for physicians. Writing is a way to explore what they see every day and can’t share. Reading is a way for students to revive the empathy that gets lost in the process of medical training”.
We at daily dose of humanities fully agree with this view.
Abraham Verghese, MD. MACP is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor in the Department of Medicine at Stanford.
Here are some relevant quotes from his published works and interviews.
1) I still find the best way to understand a hospitalized patient 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.
2) 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 physician-patient relationship is key; all else follows from it.
3) 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.
4) Tell us please, what treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?”
….I met his gaze and I did not blink.
“Words of comfort,” I said to my father
5) Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam.
6) When I use the word ‘healing’, by that I mean that every disease has a physical element that we’re very good at handling, but there’s always a sense of the violation. ‘Why me?’ ‘Why is my leg broken on the ski trip and not anyone else’s?’ And I think that medicine has done a terrible job of addressing that spiritual violation.
7) 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.
Daily Dose of Humanities 