Abraham Verghese (born 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 University Medical School.[1][2][3] In addition, he is the author of four best-selling books: two memoirs and two novels. He is the co-host with Eric Topol of the MedscapepodcastMedicine and the Machine.[4]
Verghese was born in Ethiopia to Orthodox Christian parents from Kerala, India, who worked as teachers.[10] As a child, he was an avid reader, and it was reading that introduced him to the world of medicine.[11]
He has three children, two sons by his first marriage and a third by his second marriage. His elder brother, George Verghese, is an engineering professor at MIT[12] and his younger brother, Phil Verghese, is a former software engineer at Google.[13]
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.[14] He left the country and joined his parents, who had emigrated to America.[7] There, Verghese worked as a hospital orderly for a year.[15] In his written work, he refers to that experience as deeply influential in confirming his desire to finish his medical training.
After completing his residency in 1983, he took a fellowship at Boston UniversitySchool 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.[17]
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[18] 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.[18] At San Antonio, he held the Joaquin Cigarroa Chair and the Marvin Forland Distinguished Professorship.[19]
After five years in San Antonio, he joined Stanford UniversitySchool of Medicine in 2007 as a tenured professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Associate Chair of Internal Medicine.[20] He is a hospitalist for Stanford Medical Center[1] and is the founder and director of the Presence program, which "champions the human experience in medicine."[21]
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 his tenured position to move to Iowa City with his young family. In 1991, he completed a Master of Fine Arts.[22] Later that year, The New Yorker magazine published his short story Lilacs about an AIDS patient who commits suicide.[23]
In 1994, while teaching in El Paso, he 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 TV movie directed by Mira Nair.[24]
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. [25]
In 2009, Knopf published his first novel Cutting for Stone.[26] In 2010, Random House published the paperback version of the book,[27] and it remained on The New York Times list for over two years.[28]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.[29]Cutting for Stone reached #1 on the Independent Booksellers list and was optioned as a movie.[30]
The Covenant of Water was published in May 2023 by Grove Atlantic and was chosen for Oprah's Book Club.[31] Inspired by the life story of the author's mother, to whom the book is dedicated, the story is set between 1900 and the 1970s in Kerala, a coastal territory at the southern tip of India. It follows three generations of a family in which one or more people in each generation has mysteriously died from drowning.[32][17] The book stayed on The New York Times bestseller list for 37 weeks.[33] and was listed by the newspaper as one of its 100 Notable Books of 2023.[34] In January 2024, Oprah announced that she had optioned the film rights.[35]
Bedside medicine
Verghese's early experience of working as a hospital orderly 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. [36]
His focus in San Antonio was developing medical humanities as a way to preserve doctors' innate empathy and sensitivity. 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.[37]
At Stanford University he continues to explore the importance of patient-centered bedside medicine and the physical exam, both in techniques and in the importance of the ritual of the physician's presence at the bedside.[38][3] "The Stanford 25", is an initiative developed to showcase and teach 25 fundamental physical exam skills and their diagnostic benefits to interns.[39] In a 2023 interview, Verghese commented on how his writing skills help him pay more attention to patients' stories and ask more questions that can lead to better diagnoses.[32]
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.[40]
Honorary doctorate degrees from: College of the Holy Cross (2022), McMaster University (2017), Royal College of Surgeons of Ireland (2014), Upstate Medical University, SUNY Syracuse (2012), University of Northern Illinois (2007), and Swarthmore College (2001).[1]
Sir William Osler, 1st Baronet, was a Canadian physician and one of the "Big Four" founding professors of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Osler created the first residency program for specialty training of physicians, and he was the first to bring medical students out of the lecture hall for bedside clinical training. He has frequently been described as the Father of Modern Medicine and one of the "greatest diagnosticians ever to wield a stethoscope". In addition to being a physician he was a bibliophile, historian, author, and renowned practical joker. He was passionate about medical libraries and medical history, having founded the History of Medicine Society, at the Royal Society of Medicine, London. He was also instrumental in founding the Medical Library Association of Great Britain and Ireland, and the Association of Medical Librarians along with three other people, including Margaret Charlton, the medical librarian of his alma mater, McGill University. He left his own large history of medicine library to McGill, where it became the Osler Library.
The American Medical Association (AMA) is an American professional association and lobbying group of physicians and medical students. Founded in 1847, it is headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Membership was 271,660 in 2022.
The National Academy of Medicine (NAM), known as the Institute of Medicine (IoM) until 2015, is an American nonprofit, non-governmental organization. The National Academy of Medicine is a part of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, along with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), National Academy of Engineering (NAE), and the National Research Council (NRC).
Hospital medicine is a medical specialty that exists in some countries as a branch of family medicine or internal medicine, dealing with the care of acutely ill hospitalized patients. Physicians whose primary professional focus is caring for hospitalized patients only while they are in the hospital are called hospitalists. Originating in the United States, this type of medical practice has extended into Australia and Canada. The vast majority of physicians who refer to themselves as hospitalists focus their practice upon hospitalized patients. Hospitalists are not necessarily required to have separate board certification in hospital medicine.
Bellevue Hospital is a hospital in New York City and the oldest public hospital in the United States. One of the largest hospitals in the United States by number of beds, it is located at 462 First Avenue in the Kips Bay neighborhood of Manhattan, New York City. Bellevue is also home to FDNY EMS Station 08, formerly NYC EMS Station 13.
Madras Medical College (MMC) is a public medical college located in Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India. Established in 1835, it is one of the oldest medical colleges in India, as well as in Asia.
in-Training is an online peer-reviewed publication for medical students.
William Henry Welch was an American physician, pathologist, bacteriologist, and medical-school administrator. He was one of the "Big Four" founding professors at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. He was the first dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine and was also the founder of the Johns Hopkins School of Hygiene and Public Health, the first school of public health in the country. Welch was more known for his cogent summations of current scientific work, than his own scientific research. The Johns Hopkins medical school library is also named after Welch. In his lifetime, he was called the "Dean of American Medicine" and received various awards and honors throughout his lifetime and posthumously.
Narrative medicine is the discipline of applying the skills used in analyzing literature to interviewing patients. The premise of narrative medicine is that how a patient speaks about his or her illness or complaint is analogous to how literature offers a plot with characters and is filled with metaphors, and that becoming conversant with the elements of literature facilitates understanding the stories that patients bring. Narrative Medicine is a diagnostic and comprehensive approach that utilizes patients' narratives in clinical practice, research, and education to promote healing. Beyond attempts to reach accurate diagnoses, it aims to address the relational and psychological dimensions that occur in tandem with physical illness. Narrative medicine aims not only to validate the experience of the patient, it also encourages creativity and self-reflection in the physician.
The Tennis Partner is the second of Abraham Verghese's books. Published in 1999, when he was a physician practicing internal medicine in El Paso, Texas, this is an autobiographical memoir, and Abraham Verghese writes of his experience moving to El Paso in the midst of an unraveling marriage. Once there, he meets and eventually becomes a mentor to David Smith, a medical resident at the hospital where Verghese worked and a brilliant tennis player recovering from drug addiction.
Physician writers are physicians who write creatively in fields outside their practice of medicine.
My Own Country: A Doctor's Story is Abraham Verghese's first book. First published in 1994, it made that year's New York Times Notable Book list. It is used in colleges and medical schools throughout North America and across the world because of the way it communicates the sense of empathy and compassion so often missing in medical school education in an era of high technology and reliance on computers as primary diagnostic tools.
Cutting for Stone (2009) is a novel written by Ethiopian-born Indian-American medical doctor and author Abraham Verghese. It is a saga of twin brothers, orphaned by their mother's death at their births and forsaken by their father. The book includes both a deep description of medical procedures and an exploration of the human side of medical practices.
Sir Abraham Goldberg was a British physician who was a Regius Professor of the Practice of Medicine at the University of Glasgow. He was educated at George Heriot's School in Edinburgh and the University of Edinburgh.
Mark Siegler is an American physician who specializes in internal medicine. He is the Lindy Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Surgery at the University of Chicago. He is the Founding Director of Chicago's MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics. Siegler has practiced and taught internal medicine at the University of Chicago for more than 50 years.
Graphic medicine connotes the use of comics in medical education and patient care.
David John Doukas, is an American family physician and bioethicist. He holds the James A. Knight Chair of Humanities and Ethics in Medicine, and directs the Program in Medical Ethics and Human Values at Tulane University's School of Medicine. Prof. Doukas is also the Executive Director of the Master of Science in Bioethics and Medical Humanities at Tulane University. Additionally, Dr. Doukas serves as the Health Care Chief Ethics Consultant at the Southeast Louisiana Veterans Health Care System in New Orleans as well as the VISN16 Clinical Ethics Liaison. Professor Doukas was Founding President of the Academy for Professionalism in Health Care, for which he was awarded the first Presidential Award at the Academy for Professionalism in Health Care Annual Meeting in June 2023, for his efforts as Founder and President of APHC for seven years (2012–2019). In a 2023 analysis of the top 100 cited articles in ethics education, Prof. Doukas was "recognized as one of the most influential authors in the field of ethics education, with five articles in the top 10 list attributed to his name that have amassed a total of 296 citations."
When Breath Becomes Air is a non-fiction autobiographical book written by American neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi. It is a memoir about his life and battling stage IV metastatic lung cancer. It was posthumously published by Random House on January 12, 2016.
Andrew Elder is a consultant physician in acute medicine for older people, and former medical director of MRCP(UK). He is the current President of the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.
The Covenant of Water is a 2023 novel by physician and author Abraham Verghese. The book tells the story of a Malayali family living in southwest India, in the Kerala state, with the narrative spanning three generations, from 1900 to 1977. In each generation, some members of the family die by drowning because of an affliction they refer to as "The Condition”.
↑ "Archived copy". Archived from the original on July 20, 2011. Retrieved March 13, 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) Stanford Medical Center Report
↑ "About". Presence: The Art & Science of Human Connection. Retrieved July 8, 2024.
↑ "Archived copy"(PDF). Archived from the original(PDF) on July 19, 2011. Retrieved March 13, 2011.{{cite web}}: CS1 maint: archived copy as title (link) New England Journal of Medicine 2008
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
