Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese (born May 30, 1955) is an American physician and author. He is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor of Medicine, Vice Chair for the Theory & Practice of Medicine, and Internal Medicine Clerkship Director at Stanford Medical School. He is also the author of four best-selling books: two memoirs and two novels. He is the co-host with Eric Topol of the Medscape podcast Medicine and the Machine.

In 2011, Verghese was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine. In 2014, he received the 19th Annual Heinz Award in the Arts and Humanities. President Barack Obama presented him with the National Humanities Medal in 2015. In 2023, Verghese was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. He has received seven honorary doctorate degrees.

Background

Verghese was born on May 30, 1955, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Malayali Malankara Orthodox Christian parents from Kerala, India, who worked as teachers. As a child, Verghese was an avid reader, and it was reading that introduced him to the world of medicine.

He has three children: two sons from his first marriage and a third from his second marriage. His elder brother, George Verghese, is an engineering professor at MIT, and his younger brother, Phil Verghese, is a former software engineer at Google.

Medical training and career

Verghese began his medical training in Ethiopia. In 1974, his education was interrupted by the civil unrest when emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and a Marxist military government took over. He left the country and joined his parents, who had emigrated to America. There, Verghese worked as a hospital orderly for a year. In his written work, he refers to that experience as deeply influential in confirming his desire to finish his medical training.

He went to India to complete his medical studies at Madras Medical College and was awarded an MBBS degree from the University of Madras in 1979, finishing an internship there.

Returning to the United States as a foreign medical graduate seeking an open residency position, he joined a new program in Johnson City, Tennessee, affiliated with East Tennessee State University.

After completing his residency in 1983, he took a fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine. He worked for two years at Boston City Hospital, where he encountered 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. Expecting to have one or two HIV patients a year, he soon had 100 in a small town. Although at the time he had no ambition to become a writer, he decided he wanted to tell the story of this tragedy, so he took a break from medicine to study writing.

In 1991, Verghese 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. 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.

Eleven years later, Verghese became founding Director of The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. At San Antonio, he held the Joaquin Cigarroa Chair and the Marvin Forland Distinguished Professorship.

After five years 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. He is a hospitalist for Stanford Medical Center and is the founder and director of the Presence program, which "champions the human experience in medicine."

Training and career as a writer

Overwhelmed by the nature of his work with his AIDS patients in Tennessee, and with his first marriage under strain, Verghese joined the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa. He cashed in his retirement plan and left his tenured position to move to Iowa City with his young family. In 1991, he completed a Master of Fine Arts. Later that year, The New Yorker magazine published his short story "Lilacs" about an AIDS patient who commits suicide.

In 1994, while teaching in El Paso, Verghese published his first book, My Own Country: A Doctor's Story, about his experiences in East Tennessee. In the book, he reflects on his work with the patients he cared for and gives his insights into his personal transformation from being "homoignorant", as he describes it. He also ponders 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 in 1998 it was made into a television movie directed by Mira Nair.

Verghese's 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 Verghese's 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.

In 2009, Knopf published Verghese's first novel, Cutting for Stone. In 2010, Random House published the paperback version of the book, and it remained on The New York Times list for more than two years. 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. Cutting for Stone reached No. 1 on the Independent Booksellers list and was optioned as a movie.