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ABRAHAM VERGHESE is one of the most respected and powerful writers to appear on the American nonfiction scene in the 1990s. His first book, "My Own Country: A Doctor's Story" received outstanding reviews that praised the quality of the writing and the deep passion expressed in his memoirs about treating AIDS in small-town USA - Johnson City, Tennessee, to be precise. Time magazine called it one of the five best books of 1994. The New York Times Book Review called the book "an account of the plague years in America, beautifully written, fascinating and tragic, by a doctor who was shaped and changed by his patients." In his second book, "The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss" (Harper Collins, September 1998) he penned a riveting work about coming to personal terms with love and loss through the death of his best friend and tennis partner. "My Own Country" was made into a Showtime original movie directed by Mira Nair ("Mississippi Masala" & "Kama Sutra" and starred Naveen Andrews ("The English Patient") as the author. Verghese was born in Ethiopia in 1955 to parents who were immigrants from India. He attended medical school in Ethiopia and worked in various hospitals in the U.S. before going to Madras to complete his medical education. In 1980, returned to the U.S., where he did his internship and residency in Johnson Hill, Tennessee. In 1990, Verghese worked at the University of Iowa's outpatient AIDS clinic. While there, he attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop and was encouraged to turn his Johnson City experiences into a book. He has also written for The New Yorker, Granta, Talk, Sports Illustrated and many medical journals. Profiling Verghese, writer Anne-Kathleen Kreger wrote:
In Dec. 2004, in a profile in Texas Monthly, Jan Reid described him thus: "Abraham Verghese has established himself as one of the most gifted writers ever to make Texas his home. Then again, writing is just a hobby compared with his somewhat more ambitious day job: Changing modern medicine as we know it." In 2002, after a stint as professor of medicine and chief of infectious diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas, he became the founding director of Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics, which is located on the campus of The University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. The Delectable Doctor By John Laxmi John Laxmi is a freelance writer and former banker in New York. MANHATTAN, SEPT. 27, 1999: It doesn't matter whether you have read Abraham Verghese's books. It doesn't matter what you think of Verghese as a physician. If you had attended Verghese's presentation in New York tonight, you would have left the meeting with a nagging question: Why doesn't God cast more of our species in the like of Verghese? Dr. Abraham Verghese, author of "My Own Country" and "The Tennis Partner" was the featured speaker at SAJA in New York. As usual, the venue was Maharaja Restaurant on East 44th Street. And, as usual, the meeting started a few minutes late. Blame it on trying to assemble a bunch of South Asians in one place in an orderly fashion. But, the wait was worth it: The doctor's delivery was delectable. Dr. Verghese is not merely a good doctor. He is not only an accomplished writer. He is also a good public speaker and a good conversationalist. He was making his second appearance at SAJA, this time launching the paperback edition of "The Tennis Partner." Dr. Verghese was introduced gracefully by journalists Raj Rangarajan and Deepti Hajela to a crowd of about 50 serious book lovers. I don't know about the rest of the audience, but I was under a spell as the writer read excerpts from his book. As Verghese read, you could almost feel his reliving the melancholy moments with his departed tennis partner. Words come naturally to this "African-born-but-of-Indian-parentage-naturalized-American." In a matter of an hour, he presented his many sides: the caring doctor, the careful writer, the inquisitive immigrant and finally, the well-settled citizen in "his own country." The writer spoke in a personal tone with no pretense or pomposity. He dealt with questions from the audience thoughtfully. In a matter of an hour or so, I felt like I got to know him personally and rather well. Asked if the Iowa Writer's Workshop added anything significant to his writing talent which he seems so naturally endowed with, he said he did learn a lot at the workshop that he had not expected to. He found those quiet weeks in Iowa valuable because he had a chance to slow down and read many books that he had never read. He also gained a lot from the peer criticism at the workshop. Verghese started out as a writer of fiction, but has achieved much acclaim from non-fiction. He seems to have figured out the intricacies of the publishing world with the same ease with which he seems to have mastered medicine. Did you know that nonfiction books make far more commercial success than fiction? His heart still seems set on a fictional work that is waiting to pour out from his pen. He is working on a collection of short stories with, perhaps, a novel to follow. When he finds time, he writes for Talk magazine (Tina Brown stole him from The New Yorker when she started her new venture). He keeps a regular journal and does much of his writing in the early-morning hours (or whenever his baby is asleep). He composes on the computer, but likes to edit his work on printed paper. He avoids browsing the internet, carefully picking up only what he needs from the Net. Sandhya Ganti, a physician and writer in the audience, described how the emotions of dealing with sick patients linger with her and catch up several days after dealing with a patient. Dr. Verghese agreed. He thinks that doctors (both male and female) are conditioned to bottle up their emotions, which he thinks accounts for the high incidence of suicide and addiction among doctors. He confessed that the emotional content of his own patient interactions has grown as he has grown older. In an interesting comment comparing the process of being a writer and a doctor, Verghese pointed out how both professions involved dealing very carefully with the whole as well as with details. At the end of the meeting, as the audience lined up to meet the writer, he chatted patiently with every single person, offering his telephone number or e-mail address freely. I have not yet read Dr. Verghese's books. But, as I left the meeting, I thought to myself: "If I ever fall seriously sick, this is the kind of doctor I would want, and if I ever fell into some serious trouble, this is the kind of friend I would like to have." And, yes, I am going to read his books too. - - - - - - - Here are some excerpts from a 1998 Abraham Verghese interview with Barnesandnoble.com: Q: How do you think the role of doctors will change in the next century? A: I suspect that the challenge for doctors in the next century will be to rediscover why the profession was once called the "ministry of healing," to rediscover why medicine was at one time a calling and not a particularly lucrative one at that. People who visit doctors are looking for more than a cure, they are looking for "healing" as well. To understand the distinction between "healing" and "curing," let me use an analogy: If you have ever been robbed, and if the cops came back an hour later with all the stuff taken from your home, you would be "cured" but not "healed" -- your sense of spiritual violation would still remain. In the same way, all illnesses have these two components: a physical violation and a spiritual violation. Years ago, when there were very few effective medications, the horse-and-buggy doctor by his or her presence at the bedside, often for extended periods, could bring about a healing (by which I mean helping patients come to terms with their illness) even when the disease was fatal. As Western medicine has become better at dispensing cures, the healing aspect has suffered. I think the public is much more willing to seek out alternative medicine and practitioners of alternative medicine because they recognize that Western medicine has become caught up in the conceit of cure, with no time for the spiritual violation of illness. I think the burden will be on doctors to rediscover the lost art that our predecessors of a century ago were so good at. Q: What do you see as some of the most effective ways to curb drug abuse? A: There is a saying in AA: "In your secrets lie your sickness." The sickness of addiction is one of being alone, of not really, genuinely populating one's world -- a phenomenon very apparent among impaired, addicted physicians. AA or NA works by forcing the addict into becoming a societal creature, letting go of his or her secrets and into repopulating his or her narrow world. I worry that in our technological age, we have many more friends (and cyberfriends) than ever before, but less time to nurture these friendships and relationships. And yet these connections are at the root of our mental health and our well-being, they make us feel we belong. Drug use, particularly among physicians -- one of the themes of THE TENNIS PARTNER -- is a form of medicating oneself. It's not done to produce "euphoria" but to relieve the "dysphoria" of a incredibly busy and stressful existence. If I were to narrow my answer to how one curbs drug use among physicians, I think we need to find ways for young medical students and doctors to talk about their stress and their feelings in regular organized meetings. The AA meeting model is a great one; it applies to any profession, any group of people. It gives a place to vent. The macho, witness-the-carnage-but-keep-it-all-in mentality of residency training does not serve us well and makes it more likely that we will, when we are ill, self-medicate and deny our patienthood to the very end. In society at large, the war on drugs really hasn't worked. Addiction, once established, is an illness as discrete and distinct as diabetes is an illness. The more we understand about the brain, about a part of it called the medial forebrain bundle, the more we will see addiction as a neurological disorder. And as an illness we need to treat it, not jail the victim. I suspect 50 years from now we will look back on the war on drugs as being as primitive as the chaining up of mentally ill patients a century or so ago. Q: If you could invent something, what would it be? A: That's easy: a time capsule into which I could escape for a six month sabbatical and return to find that only a minute of ordinary time has passed! Q: Name your three favorite books. A: a) OF HUMAN BONDAGE by Somerset Maugham This is the book that first stirred my passion for medicine when I was just 12. b) LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA by Gabriel García Márquez The most sensuous novel I have read. c) THE WORLD ACCORING TO GARP by John Irving A grand comic novel, in the best tradition of the comic novelists like Charles Dickens and Günter Grass. -30- |
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