Abraham Verghese | |
|---|---|
 Verghese in 2023 | |
| Born | May 30, 1955 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia |
| Occupation | Professor of medicine, author |
| Nationality | American |
| Alma mater | Madras Medical College |
| Period | 1980 to present |
| Genre | medical book, autobiography, novel |
| Notable works | My Own Country, The Tennis Partner, Cutting for Stone, The Covenant of Water |
| Website | |
| www | |
Abraham Verghese (born 1955) is an American physician, author and Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Vice Chair of Education at Stanford University Medical School.[1] He is the author of four best-selling books: two memoirs and two novels. In 2011, he was elected to be a member of the Institute of Medicine.[2] He received the National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama in 2015.[3] He is the co-host with Eric Topol of the podcast Medscape Medicine and the Machine.[4]
Verghese was born in Ethiopia to Orthodox Christian parents from Kerala, India, who worked as teachers.[5]
Verghese began his medical training in Ethiopia. His education was interrupted by the civil unrest when emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and a Marxist military government took over.[6] He emigrated to America with his parents and two brothers. His elder brother, George Verghese, is an engineering professor at MIT and his younger brother, Phil Verghese, is a Staff Software Engineer at Google. Verghese worked as an orderly for a year.[7] In his written work, he refers to his time working as an orderly in a hospital in America as deeply influential in confirming his desire to finish his medical training. The experience gave him a deep understanding of the patient's hospital situation with its varying levels of treatment and care. He has said the insights he gained from this work helped him to become a more empathic physician and resulted in the motto, "Imagining the Patient's Experience", that defined his later work. [8]
He completed his medical studies at Madras Medical College and was awarded a Bachelor of Medicine degree from Madras University in 1979, finishing an internship there. He returned to the United States as a foreign medical graduate seeking an open residency position. [9] He joined a new program in Johnson City, Tennessee, affiliated with East Tennessee State University. He was a resident there from 1980 to 1983, and then took a fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine. He worked for two years at Boston City Hospital, encountering the early signs of the urban HIV epidemic. Returning to Johnson City in 1985 as assistant professor of medicine, he saw the first signs of a second epidemic, that of rural AIDS. His first book, My Own Country (1994) reflects on his work with the patients he cared for at this time and gives his insights into his personal transformation from being "homoignorant", as he describes it.
Verghese has three children, two sons by his first marriage and a third by his second marriage.
Overwhelmed by the nature of his work with his patients, and with his first marriage under strain, he decided to take a break. He joined the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He cashed in his retirement plan and his tenured position to move to Iowa City with his young family. He completed a Master of Fine Arts in 1991.[10] He then accepted a position as Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas, where he lived for the next 11 years. Despite his title, he was the sole infectious disease physician at Thomason Hospital. He was awarded the Grover E. Murray Distinguished Professorship of Medicine at the Texas Tech School of Medicine.
During these years in El Paso, he published My Own Country: A Doctor's Story, about his experiences in East Tennessee, pondering themes of displacement, diaspora, responses to foreignness and the many individuals and families affected by the AIDS epidemic. This book was one of five chosen as 'Best Book of the Year' by Time magazine and it was later made into a movie. His second memoir, The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss, was also written during his time in El Paso. It tells the story of his friend and tennis partner, a medical resident in recovery from drug addiction. The story deals with the ultimate death of his friend and explores the issue and prevalence of physician drug abuse. It also charts the breakdown of his first marriage, an integral part of the narrative in both My Own Country and The Tennis Partner. This book was reissued in 2009. [11]
In 2009, Knopf published his first novel Cutting for Stone.[12] In 2010, Random House published the paperback version of the book [13] and it remained on The New York Times list for over two years.[14] Cutting for Stone describes a period of dramatic political change in Ethiopia, a time of great loss for the author, who, as an expatriate, had to leave the country of his birth.[15] Cutting for Stone reached #1 on the Independent Booksellers list and was optioned as a movie.[16] Verghese's writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, The Atlantic, The New York Times, Granta, Forbes and The Wall Street Journal. In 2014, Verghese received the 19th Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities.
The Covenant of Water was published in May 2023 by Grove Atlantic, becoming an Oprah's Book Club pick.
Verghese became founding Director of The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio in 2002.[17] His focus here was developing medical humanities as a way to preserve doctors' innate empathy and sensitivity. In San Antonio, he developed a formal humanities and ethics curriculum integrated into all four years of the medical school program. He also invited medical students to accompany him on bedside rounds as a way of demonstrating his conviction in the value of the physical examination in diagnosing patients and in developing a caring, two-way patient-doctor relationship that benefits not only patients and their families but also the physician.[18] At San Antonio, he held the Joaquin Cigarroa Chair and the Marvin Forland Distinguished Professorship.[19]
After a relatively short, five-year tenure in San Antonio, he joined Stanford University School of Medicine in 2007 as a tenured professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Associate Chair of Internal Medicine.[20] He directs the third-year medical student clerkship and his work continues to explore the importance of patient-centred bedside medicine and the physical exam.[21] "The Stanford 25", is an initiative developed to showcase and teach 25 fundamental physical exam skills and their diagnostic benefits to interns.[22]
Verghese's emphasis on the physical examination has been dismissed by some as a form of irrelevant nostalgia. As Robert Goodman writes: "Lamenting lost clinical skills is possibly one of our profession's oldest pastimes, dating back centuries, if not millennia...Should we spend more time at the bedside? Certainly...But... we should spend this time not divining for ascitic fluid (ultrasound is better) but, instead, talking to our patients.[23]
