CUTTING FOR STONE

I recently finished the new, debut novel by Dr. Abraham Verghese entitled "Cutting for Stone." In ancient times, "cutting for stone" was the act of surgically attempting to extract mental illness/madness. The Hippocratic Oath, which I, myself, took 11 years ago (has it already been that long?) states that one will not do this. Those Greeks were wise!

I first became acquainted with Abraham Verghese in 1994 when I was a medical student in Houston. He gave a lecture, or rather a reading, from his first non-fiction book, "My Own Country." It is the story of an Ethiopian-born physician of Indian descent who came here on the "cowpath to America" to do residency training in a small, rural hospital in Tennessee populated by foreign grads; he had no other opportunity. He went on to do his Infectious Disease training at Boston University, a pre-eminent center in its time. Subsequently, he returned to rural Tennessee, and "My Own Country" chronicles his life and practice there as someone, like the young, gay men with AIDS whom he treats, who has never had a place of acceptance, a home, a country to call his own. For me, it was not until medical school that I found a community to which I truly felt I belonged (see Amit, Asim, Donohue, Swurz, Chap, etc).

His second book, "The Tennis Partner," details his friendship, played out on the tennis court and beyond, with a medical student who is a recovering drug addict. I had the good fortune to hear Abraham read from this at the Dallas Museum of Art during my residency and to meet him afterwards. He was every bit the gentleman and inspiring figure I imagined he would be. In many ways, this blog, my way of sharing and recording my thoughts on life, family, and medicine, springs from his example. .

"Cutting for Stone" is described as fiction, but the influences from Verghese's own life are obvious. The novel is set in Ethiopia and revolves around a set of twins born to a nun, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, who dies in childbirth in the opening section of the book. The man, who is presumably the twins' father, Dr. Thomas Stone, a legendary surgeon, hastily leaves the mission hospital, at which he and Sister Mary had worked closely together for years, in despair soon after her death. From here the novel recounts the story of the twin boys named Shiva and Marion Stone and their growing up in 20th century Ethiopia. It is a story about love: filial (the love of a son for his adopted mother and father and for the specter of the biological father whom he never knew), brotherly, and also romantic (the love of a young man for a young woman whose flame cannot be easily extinguished...despite her best efforts). It speaks to the power of this emotion despite class, race, and distance, and the strength of this emotion even within a young, awkward, persistent teenage boy who felt he had found someone special (Been there, done that).

I will not "spoil" the story, but when I closed the book after reading the final page on a transcontinental flight back home to Portland, I had tears in my eyes. I cried not only because of the beauty of Abraham's words but also because someone had written something so personal and yet which I found to be so resonant of my own life, my own thoughts, and my own story. While I respect the critics in the New York Times Book Review, there is an intangibility, a transcendence in Abraham's writing that may be lost on experts of literary criticism but which is not lost on those who have felt like they were on the outside looking in for much of their lives. It is my belief that it was for us that "Cutting for Stone" was intended.