Cutting for Stone

by Abraham Verghese

And because I love this life I know I shall love death as well. The child cries out when From the right breast the mother Takes it away, in the very next moment To find in the left one Its consolation. —Rabindranath Tagore, from Gitanjali

Few doctors will admit this, certainly not young ones, but subconsciously, in entering the profession, we must believe that ministering to others will heal our woundedness. And it can. But it can also deepen the wound.

My father put his hand on my shoulder. He spoke to me gently, as if to a junior colleague rather than his son. “Marion, remember the Eleventh Commandment,” he said. “Thou shall not operate on the day of a patient’s death.”

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.

We are all fixing what is broken. It is the task of a lifetime. We’ll leave much unfinished for the next generation.

Yes, I have infinite faith in the craft of surgery, but no surgeon can heal the kind of wound that divides two brothers. Where silk and steel fail, story must succeed.

for the secret of the care of the patient is in caring for the patient. Francis W. Peabody, October 21, 1925

As she bent over the child she realized that the tragedy of death had to do entirely with what was left unfulfilled.

Wasn’t that the definition of home? Not where you are from, but where you are wanted?

In order to start to get rid of your slippers, you have to admit they are yours, and if you do, then they will get rid of themselves.”

The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

“You use what? Interruptus? Pull and pray? Good God, man! No wonder you have five kids! It’s noble of you to try to get off the train at an earlier station, but it’s unreliable. No sir. Interrupt the interruptus, man, unless you want to reach your half dozen this year.”

The mind was fragile, fickle, but the human body was resilient.

The fact that people were attentive to his body does not compensate for their ignoring his being.’ ”

Surely you couldn’t be a good doctor and a terrible human being—surely the laws of man, if not of God, didn’t allow it.

IF THE BEATING HEART is pure theater, a playful, moody, extroverted organ cavorting in the chest, then the liver, sitting under the diaphragm, is a figurative painting, stolid and silent.

The world turns on our every action, and our every omission, whether we know it or not.