Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is a professor, doctor, and award-winning writer. As a physician, he earned a reputation for his compassion, and for championing healing and the human side of medicine, which he says grew from his experiences as an orderly and as a doctor of infectious diseases during the AIDS epidemic. His deep interest in bedside medicine, teaching, and writing led to his recruitment to Stanford University School of Medicine in 2007 as a tenured professor and senior associate chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine. He has since been named the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford School of Medicine. He has written several bestselling books including Cutting for Stone and My Own Country. He has received the Heinz Award (2014) and the National Humanities Medal (2015) for his work.
Verghese was born in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia to Orthodox Christian parents from Kerala, India, who worked there as teachers. Verghese began his medical training in Ethiopia. His education was interrupted by the civil unrest when emperor Haile Selassie was deposed by a militia. His family emigrated to America and he joined them for a time. He worked as an orderly for a year, an experience that deeply impacted him and confirmed his desire to finish his medical training. He says that the insights from this experience helped him become a more empathic physician and resulted in his motto, “Imagining the Patient’s Experience.”
He completed his medical studies and was awarded a Bachelor of Medicine degree from Madras University in India. He returned to the United States as a foreign medical graduate seeking an open residency position. He joined a program in Johnson City, Tennessee. There he was a resident there from 1980 to 1983, before taking a fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine. He worked for two years at Boston City Hospital, where he witnessed the early signs of the urban HIV epidemic. When he returned 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 recounts his experience from 1985 to 1990 as he became the local AIDs expert and doctor for scores of patients affected in Tennessee, and in the surrounding Kentucky-Virginia-North Carolina area. His second memoir, The Tennis Partner: A Doctor’s Story of Friendship and Loss, recounts his friendship with David Smith, a medical student recovering from drug addiction. His two fictional works, Cutting for Stone and The Covenant of Water, have received wide acclaim. Oprah Winfrey has said that The Covenant of Water is “one of the best books I’ve read in my entire life.”
Verghese has three children, two sons by his first marriage and a third by his second marriage.
