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.
Interpretation
The quote emphasizes the importance of the doctor-patient relationship and the transformative power of rituals in healthcare.
Abraham Verghese highlights the significance of rituals in the doctor-patient relationship, suggesting that these practices are not merely routine but hold the potential to transform and elevate the interaction between healthcare providers and patients. He argues that as we lose these rituals, we risk diminishing the depth and quality of these essential human connections in medicine, which are fundamental to healing.
In practice
During a medical conference, discussing the importance of maintaining rituals in patient care.
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?
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.
It was all I had, all I've ever had, the only currency, the only proof that I was alive. Memory.
My VIP patients often regret so many things on their deathbeds. They regret the bitterness they'll leave in people's hearts. They realize the no money, no church service, no eulogy, no funeral procession no matter how elaborate, can remove the legacy of a mean spirit.
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.
Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school - not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical.
It's hard to be the one always waiting. I mean, there's something to be said for the hero who charges off to battle, but when you get right down to it there's a whole story in who's left behind.
And that really captures the difference for the bullied straight kid versus the bullied gay kid, is that the bullied straight kid goes home to a shoulder to cry on and support and can talk freely about his experience at school and why he's being bullied. [...] And I couldn't go home and open up to my parents.
To memorize a scripture is to forge a new friendship.
What, my dear Lady Disdain! are you yet living? Beatrice: Is it possible disdain should die while she hath such meet food to feed it as Signior Benedick?
I can remember, when I was in college, irritating deeply somebody I was going out with, because he would ask me what I was thinking and I would say I was thinking nothing. And it was true.
I am one, sir, that comes to tell you your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.(IAGO,ActI,SceneI)
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