Abraham Verghese, 2016

“I want to teach the art of being present.”

Abraham Verghese wrote this sentence in The Importance of Being, an essay published in the October 2016 issue of Health Affairs. He approaches medicine through an unexpected setting: repeated visits to Stanford’s Anderson Collection, where looking at modern art gradually changes the way he thinks about attention. The connection is not that a painting can diagnose an illness. It is that observing without immediately reaching for a familiar label can reveal something an observer otherwise overlooks. When the essay turns to teaching at the bedside, Verghese describes wanting students to encounter a person, rather than only the information already assembled about that person. The short declaration identifies a skill he considers teachable. Being present, in this account, asks more than occupying the same room or appearing briefly in a patient’s field of vision.

The essay gives that aspiration a practical tension: records, screens, and institutional requirements can draw clinicians away from the people whose care the information is meant to support. Verghese does not deny the necessity of a medical record. He distinguishes the representation of a patient within it from the actual encounter. His recollections of caring for patients in the early AIDS era also connect presence to the assurance that someone will not be abandoned when effective treatment is unavailable. Writing in Health Affairs shortly afterward, Eric Topol welcomed the essay while arguing that technology and human connection need not conflict. That response prevents an easy reduction of the quotation to a demand to discard computers. A useful question is whether a tool supports the encounter or consumes the attention that the encounter requires. Stanford’s later Presence work likewise treats focused attention and connection as practices to investigate and cultivate.

Consider an ordinary conversation in which one person explains a worry while the listener completes a separate task. The listener may capture every factual detail yet miss the hesitation that gives a detail its significance. In a clinical setting, that distinction can affect whether someone feels able to speak freely about what matters to them. This example is an interpretation of the essay’s concern, rather than evidence that a particular manner guarantees a medical outcome. Attention must work alongside knowledge, appropriate examination, and sound judgment. Teaching presence could therefore involve noticing when one’s own assumptions are directing the conversation, making room for the patient’s priorities, and recognizing the limits of a first impression. There is also an institutional dimension: an individual clinician cannot create unlimited time inside a schedule that provides too little. Verghese’s sentence gives educators a reason to examine both habits and working conditions, so that contact with patients remains a central part of learning medicine.