Imagine working at a prestigious university where you practice medicine and teach medical students but are also given “protected time to write.”

Abraham Verghese, M.D., MACP, happily finds himself in this position. He is program director of Stanford’s Internal Residency Program and senior associate chair for the theory and practice of medicine. He has published several articles, two nonfiction books, and most recently, his first novel Cutting for Stone, which received rave reviews from both The Washington Post and The New York Times Book Review.

Verghese was born in Ethiopia of Indian parents. He attended medical school at Madras Medical College and completed his residency in Johnson City, Tenn. After completing a fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine, he stayed on for another two years.

But then he returned to Johnson City, where he specialized in infectious diseases during the early years of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.

The “AIDS cocktail” has helped people forget the period when doctors could do little for AIDS patients except watch them die and try to make their remaining days comfortable. In Tennessee, Verghese treated patients who were often shunned by family, doctors, nurses and the community. He learned that although he could not be the all-curing doctor, he could help patients come to terms with their fatal illness and heal in other ways.

Verghese said that when he was working in those early days of AIDS, “it was important for me to write in order to understand what was going on. Just thinking or talking about something doesn’t do that. Writing helps me understand what I’m thinking.”

In 1990, Verghese took a hiatus from medicine to join the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts in 1991. He then accepted a position as professor of medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Texas Tech Health Services Center in El Paso, Texas.

And it was here, in El Paso, that Verghese began writing seriously.

Verghese’s compassionate approach to working with terminally ill patients in rural Tennessee became the basis for his first book, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story, published in 1995. This moving memoir of his work with AIDS patients, their families and the surrounding community became a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a Time magazine Book of the Year.

In his second book, The Tennis Partner, Verghese recalls a close friendship with a colleague who had problems with drug addiction.

Cutting for Stone, published this year, is an epic novel that spans 50 years, starting in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The book begins with a difficult birth — difficult not only because the mother is in distress but also because she is a nun and the father, Thomas Stone, is the surgeon charged with saving the mother and her twin babies. The twins survive, the mother does not and the father disappears.

Over the next 50 years, we come to know the doctors who marry each other for love and raise the twins, Marion and Shiva Stone. We also come to know the fears, loves, and motivations of Marion, the narrator, and his brother, Shiva.
Verghese has a talent for weaving many events and emotions into a story — love, loss, confusion, responsibility, sexual experiences, life choices (and their consequences), genital mutilation, political upheaval, and more. The book is emotionally riveting, and the reader gets to know and care for all the characters.

Verghese is an extraordinary writer, writing clearly and passionately about medical and life issues in a way that draws in the reader.

He acknowledged that while the book’s geographic descriptions are based on his early experiences in Addis Ababa, he stressed that the story is not autobiographical.

“When you write, it’s your imagination that comes through,” he explained. “When you give people emotions and have them speak, you are revealing your own great loves and pet peeves.”

Verghese believes that “there is something mysterious about the act of writing.” He found that many of his tomes are not what he thought they would be when he started.

When asked why he wrote a novel after two books of nonfiction, Verghese said, “Fiction is a way we interpret ourselves. When good fiction works, there’s truth at work.”

Furthermore, Verghese enjoys reading novels. “You can get into a spaceship and spend five hours in another place, then come back — all in the same afternoon. A good novel doesn’t just distract you from your life; it transports you to another world.”

But when the time comes for him to put a good novel back on the shelf and return to work, he is happy to, as he thinks highly of the doctors he works with here in northern California.

“These doctors seem to be throwbacks to the classical physicians — not narrowly focusing on only their own thing,” he said. “They don’t fit the stereotype of the crass physician searching for lots of money.”

“Stanford is an incredible place,” Verghese added. “All the doctors here have a ‘specialness’— research, medicine. Mine is writing. Stanford is willing to try new things. When I worked at other medical schools, I did some writing, but they largely wanted me to be a clinician. Here, I am given time to pursue my writing.”

Lorri Ungaretti is a contributing editor of the Healthcare Journal. She can be reached at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .