2011.01.09 03:39
by Abraham Verghese, which I just finished reading. This is "National Bestseller" right now.
I've read in so many years. The book had a lot in common with us, our alumni, in that the main character, a foreign medical school graduate, was brought up in Ethiopia during the dictatorship and multiple coups, and, then went through his postgraduate training in Bronx, NY, after he came to America. The story was ringing so true in my heart and in my own experience that I could not drop the book until I finished reading. Without question, I thought there were lots of parallels between the story and my experiences. In addition, it was an eye-opening experience to learn that there was a third world surrounding Ethiopia to which I've been oblivious. There was so much human suffering, happening just like we had in Korea during the war. I felt that the book provides some, ? new, fresh perspectives |
2011.01.09 03:41
2011.01.09 06:17
I wish one of us could write something like this.
I am sure that we have accumulated more than enough episodes to write about
but we haven't written them down.
Once our generation passes away,
some of our histories are going to get forgotten and lost forever.
Unfortunately, it won't be very long before it will happen.
Even in small informal pieces, can it be written down here in our website?
2011.01.09 08:38
2011.01.09 21:42
2011.01.10 13:29
Dr. Bang;
I agree with you 100%.
If I am a teacher and the members of our website are students,
I will request (it's an order !!) each one of members to do a homework
of writing a piece about "My Life in America_Early Years".
But I am not the teacher and you are not students.
It won't happen. I can just wish some of you to do it.
2011.01.10 19:48
I thought it would be very interesting, if we do.
And it might be a good guide to our younger generation
to show how we began, why we came to America, so on.
The reason I specified as Early Years is the years we faced
tumulous years, psychologically, mentally, in the process of
Amalgamation and Assimilation. It doesn't have to be great,
because our stories would be unique to others in general.
One of these days I might start myself, even though many
parts would be repeating ones I wrote on our site.
Abraham Verghese, MD, MACP, is Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine.
Early Years
Born of India parents who were teachers in Ethiopia, he grew up near Addis Ababa and began his medical training there. When Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed, he completed his training at Madras Medical College and went to the United States for his residency as one of many foreign medical graduates. Like many others, he found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him, an experience he described in one of his early New Yorker articles, The Cowpath to America.
From Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was a resident from 1980 to 1983, he did his fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine, working at Boston City Hospital for two years. It was here that he first saw the early signs of the HIV epidemic and later, when he returned to Johnson City as an assistant professor of medicine, he saw the second epidemic, rural AIDS, and his life took the turn for which he is most well known ? his caring for numerous AIDS patients in an era when little could be done and helping them through their early and painful deaths was often the most a physician could do.
First Books
His work with terminal patients and the insights he gained from the deep relationships he formed and the suffering he saw were intensely transformative; they became the basis for his first book, My Own Country : A Doctor's Story, written later during his years in El Paso, Texas. Such was his interest in writing that he decided to take some time away from medicine to study at the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1991. Since then, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Forbes.com, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.
Following Iowa, he became professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas, where he lived for the next 11 years. In addition to writing his first book, which was one of five chosen as Best Book of the Year by Time magazine and later made into a Mira Nair movie, he also wrote a second best-selling book, The Tennis Partner : A Story of Friendship and Loss, about his friend and tennis partner?s struggle with addiction. This was a New York Times' Notable Book.
Emphasis on the Physician-Patient Relationship
As founding director of the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio, he brought the deep-seated empathy for patient suffering that had been honed by his previous experiences to his new role in the medical humanities. He saw empathy as a way to preserve the innate empathy and sensitivity that brings students to medical school but which the rigors of their training frequently suppress. In San Antonio, also, he became more focused on bedside medicine, inviting medical students to accompany him on bedside rounds. Rounds gave him a way to share the value he places on the physical examination in diagnosing patients and demonstrating attentiveness to patients and their families, a vital key in the healing process.
Dr. Verghese's deep interest in bedside medicine and his reputation as a clinician, teacher and writer led to his being recruited to Stanford University in 2007 as a tenured professor. Today, in his writing and his work, he continues to emphasize the importance of bedside medicine and physical examination in a time in medicine when the use of advanced technology frequently results in the patient in the bed having less attention than the patient data in the computer. His recent article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Culture Shock: Patient as Icon, Icon as Patient, clearly lays out his viewpoint. In his book, Cutting for Stone , he also addresses the issue "I wanted the reader to see how entering medicine was a passionate quest, a romantic pursuit, a spiritual calling, a privileged yet hazardous undertaking. It's a view of medicine I don't think too many young people see in the West because, frankly, in the sterile hallways of modern medical-industrial complexes, where physicians and nurses are hunkered down behind computer monitors, and patients are whisked off here and there for this and that test, that side of medicine gets lost."