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	==See also==		==See also==
	~~{{Portal\|Biography}}~~
	* [[Physician writer]]		* [[Physician writer]]

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>Bearcat: award categories are for winners, not non-winning nominees

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{{BLP sources|date=March 2009}}
{{Use mdy dates|date=October 2011}}
{{Infobox writer
| name = Abraham Verghese
| birth_name = 
| image = Verghese, Abraham, blurred 2.jpg
| caption = Verghese in 2011
| birth_date = {{Birth date and age|1955|05|30}}
| birth_place = [[Addis Ababa]], Ethiopia
| occupation = Professor of medicine, author
| nationality = American
| period = 1980 to present
| genre = [[Medical handbook|medical book]], [[autobiography]], novel
| notableworks = ''[[My Own Country]],'' ''[[The Tennis Partner]]'', ''[[Cutting for Stone]]''
| influences =
| influenced =
| website = {{URL|https://www.abrahamverghese.org/}}
| alma_mater = [[Madras Medical College]], Madras, now [[Chennai]]
}}

'''Abraham Verghese''' (born 1955) is an American physician, author, Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at [[Stanford University Medical School]] and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of [[Internal Medicine]].<ref>[http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2008/march19/med-verghese-031908.html Stanford Report: Physician returns to the art of healing in medicine]</ref> He is also the author of three best-selling books, two memoirs and a novel. In 2011, he was elected to be a member of the [[Institute of Medicine]].<ref>[http://www.stanforddaily.com/2011/10/19/three-school-of-med-profs-elected-to-institute-of-medicine/]</ref> He received the [[National Humanities Medal]] from [[President Barack Obama]] in 2015.<ref>{{Cite news|url=https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/09/22/remarks-president-presentation-2015-national-medals-arts-and-humanities|title=Remarks by the President at the Presentation of the 2015 National Medals of the Arts and Humanities|date=2016-09-22|work=whitehouse.gov|access-date=2017-06-29|language=en}}</ref>

He was born in [[Ethiopia]] to Christian parents from [[Kerala]], [[India]], who worked as teachers.<ref>{{cite news| url=http://www.economist.com/books/displaystory.cfm?story_id=13097624&fsrc=rss | work=The Economist | title=Under the knife | date=12 February 2009}}</ref> In 2009, Knopf published his new book and first novel, ''Cutting for Stone''.<ref>[http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6617767.html?industryid=47159 Publishers Weekly: Across Continents]</ref> In 2010, [[Random House]] published the paperback version of the book and it rose on the bestseller charts, achieving a rank of #2 on ''[[The New York Times]]'' trade paperback fiction list on March 13, 2011.<ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/trade-fiction-paperback/list.html New York Times Best Sellers]</ref> It remained on ''The New York Times'' list for well over two years.<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.nytimes.com/best-sellers-books/trade-fiction-paperback/list.html | work=The New York Times | first=Gregory | last=Cowles | title=Print & E-Books}}</ref> In 2014, Verghese received the 19th Annual [[Heinz Awards|Heinz Award]] in the Arts and Humanities.{{update section|date=July 2018}}

==Medical training and early career==

Verghese began his medical training in Ethiopia, but his education was interrupted during the civil unrest there when the [[Haile Selassie|Emperor]] was deposed and a Marxist military government took over.<ref>[https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/health/12profile.html Denise Grady, "Scientist at Work: Dr. Abraham Verghese," ''The New York Times'', 11 October 2010]</ref> He came to America with his parents and two brothers (his elder brother George Verghese is an engineering professor at [[Massachusetts Institute of Technology|MIT]] and his younger brother Phil Verghese is a Staff Software Engineer at [[Google]]). Verghese worked as an orderly for a year before going to India where he completed his medical studies at [[Madras Medical College]] in Madras, now [[Chennai]].<ref>[https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/15/AR2009021501861.html?referrer=emailarticle Bob Thompson, "Diagnosis: Author — Physician Turned To Writing to Heal Himself, Others," ''Washington Post'', 16 February 2009] Retrieved 17 February 2009.</ref> In his written work, he refers to his time working as an orderly in a hospital in America as deeply influential in confirming his desire to finish his medical training; the experience had given 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 become a more empathic physician and resulted in the motto, "Imagining the Patient's Experience", that defined his later work at the Center for Medical Humanities & Ethics in [[San Antonio, Texas|San Antonio]], [[Texas]], which he directed for five years from 2002 to 2007.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.abrahamverghese.com/biography.asp |title=Archived copy |accessdate=2011-03-13 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110624213457/http://abrahamverghese.com/biography.asp |archivedate=June 24, 2011 |df=mdy }} Abrahamverghese.com.</ref>

After finishing his medical degree ([[Bachelor of Medicine, Bachelor of Surgery|MBBS]]) from [[Madras University]] in 1979, and then completing his internship there, he came to the United States as one of hundreds of [[foreign medical graduates]] (FMGs) from India seeking open [[Residency (medicine)|residency]] positions. As he described it in a ''[[The New Yorker|New Yorker]]'' article, "The Cowpath to America", many FMGs often had to work in the less popular hospitals and communities, and frequently in [[inner city|inner cities]].<ref>[https://www.newyorker.com/archive/1997/06/23/1997_06_23_070_TNY_CARDS_000378412 Abraham Verghese, Personal History, "The Cowpath to America,"] ''[[The New Yorker]], June 23, 1997, p.70. Retrieved 15 March 2009.</ref> He opted for a residency in a brand-new program in [[Johnson City, Tennessee|Johnson City]], [[Tennessee]], affiliated with [[East Tennessee State University]]. He was a resident there from 1980 to 1983, and then secured a coveted fellowship at [[Boston University]] [[Boston University School of Medicine|School of Medicine]] in 1983, where he worked for two years at [[Boston City Hospital]] and where he saw the early signs of the urban epidemic of [[HIV]] in that city. Returning to Johnson City in 1985 as assistant professor of medicine (he later became a tenured associate professor there), he encountered the first signs of a second epidemic, that of rural [[AIDS]]. His work with the patients he cared for and his insights into his personal transformation from being "homoignorant", as he describes it, to having an understanding of his patients resulted a few years later in his first book, ''[[My Own Country]]''.

==New direction: writing==

Exhausted from the overwhelming nature of his work with his patients, with his first marriage under strain and by then having begun to write seriously, he decided to take a break. He applied to and was accepted to the [[Iowa Writers Workshop]] at the [[University of Iowa]]. He cashed in his retirement plan and his tenured position to go to [[Iowa City]] with his young family. There, he honed his writing skills and earned a [[Master of Fine Arts]] in 1991.<ref>[http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/Abraham_Verghese/]</ref> After Iowa, he 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|El Paso]], Texas, where he lived for the next 11 years. Despite his title, he was the sole infectious disease physician for a busy county hospital—Thomason Hospital—for many years. His skills and commitment to patient care resulted in his being awarded the Grover E. Murray Distinguished Professorship of Medicine at the Texas Tech School of Medicine.

During these years in El Paso, he also wrote and published his first book, the bestseller ''[[My Own Country]]: A Doctor's Story'', about his experiences in East Tennessee, but also pondering 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 it was later made into a movie by [[Mira Nair]] with ''[[Lost (TV series)|Lost]]'' star [[Naveen Andrews]] playing his role.

His second book, ''[[The Tennis Partner]]: A Story of Friendship and Loss,'' also written during his time in El Paso, is another eloquently personal story, this time about 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 concludes the account of 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.

Verghese has three children, two grown sons by his first marriage and a third by his second marriage.

==Bedside medicine==
Verghese became founding Director of The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the [[University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio]] in 2002.<ref>http://abrahamverghese.com/home/biography</ref> His focus here was on medical humanities as a way to preserve the innate [[empathy]] and sensitivity that brings students to medical school but which the rigor of their training frequently represses. In San Antonio, besides developing a formal humanities and ethics curriculum that was integrated into all four years of the medical school program, he invited medical students to accompany him on bedside rounds as a way of demonstrating his conviction about the value of the [[physical examination]] in diagnosing patients and in developing a caring, two-way [[Doctor–patient relationship|patient-doctor relationship]] that benefits not only patients and their families but also the physician.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.abrahamverghese.com/biography.asp |title=Archived copy |accessdate=2011-03-13 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110624213457/http://abrahamverghese.com/biography.asp |archivedate=June 24, 2011 |df=mdy }}</ref> At San Antonio, he held the Joaquin Cigarroa Chair and the Marvin Forland Distinguished Professorship.<ref>{{cite web|url=http://humanism-in-medicine.org/index.php/programs_grants/other_initiatives/humanism_and_medicine_lecture |title=Archived copy |accessdate=2012-02-22 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20120130155303/http://www.humanism-in-medicine.org/index.php/programs_grants/other_initiatives/humanism_and_medicine_lecture |archivedate=January 30, 2012 |df=mdy }}</ref>

After a relatively short, five-year tenure in San Antonio, he was recruited to [[Stanford University]] [[Stanford University School of Medicine|School of Medicine]] in late 2007 as tenured professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine and Associate Chair of Internal Medicine.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://med.stanford.edu/mcr/2008/verghese-0319.html |title=Archived copy |accessdate=2011-03-13 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110720045824/http://med.stanford.edu/mcr/2008/verghese-0319.html |archivedate=July 20, 2011 |df=mdy-all }} Stanford Medical Center Report</ref> His deep interest in bedside medicine and his reputation as a clinician, teacher and writer have continued to define his role at Stanford, where he is deeply involved with patients at [[Stanford Hospital]] and directs the third-year medical student clerkship. His writing and work continue to explore the importance of bedside medicine, the ritual of the physical examination in the era of advanced technology, where, as he notes frequently in his writing, the patient in the bed is often ignored in favor of the patient data in the computer.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://medicine.stanford.edu/education/includes/articles/Verghese.pdf |title=Archived copy |accessdate=2011-03-13 |url-status=dead |archiveurl=https://web.archive.org/web/20110719200224/http://medicine.stanford.edu/education/includes/articles/Verghese.pdf |archivedate=July 19, 2011 |df=mdy-all }} New England Journal of Medicine 2008</ref> He is renowned at Stanford for his weekly bedside rounds, where he insists on examining patients without knowledge of their diagnosis to demonstrate the wealth of information available from the physical exam. This emphasis has led to the development of "The Stanford 25", a new initiative at Stanford designed to showcase and teach 25 fundamental physical exam skills and their diagnostic benefits to interns.<ref>http://stanfordmedicine25.stanford.edu/the25.html Stanford Initiative in Bedside Medicine</ref>

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.<ref>doi: 10.1097/ACM.0b013e3181dbb55b</ref>

==''Cutting for Stone''==
His first novel, ''[[Cutting for Stone]]'', is set in Ethiopia and the United States and describes a period of dramatic political change in Ethiopia, a time of great loss for the author himself, who as an expatriate had to leave the country even though he had been born there.<ref>{{cite news |last=Wagner |first=Erica |title=Doctors and Sons |date=February 6, 2009 |url=https://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/08/books/review/Wagner-t.html |work=The New York Times}}</ref> ''Cutting for Stone'' reached #1 on the Independent Booksellers list and was optioned as a movie.<ref>{{cite news| url=https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/cutting-stone-optioned-screen-anonymous-95065 | work=The Hollywood Reporter | first=Lindsay | last=Powers | title='Cutting for Stone' Optioned for Screen by Anonymous Content}}</ref> Verghese's writing has also appeared in ''The New Yorker'', ''[[Texas Monthly]],'' ''[[The Atlantic]]'', ''The New York Times,'' ''[[The New York Times Magazine]]'', ''[[Granta]]'', ''[[Forbes]]'' ''[[The Daily Beast]]'' and ''[[The Wall Street Journal]]''.

==Works==
*''[[My Own Country|My Own Country: A Doctor's Story]]'' (1994)
*''[[The Tennis Partner]]'' (1998)
*''[[Cutting for Stone]]'' (2008)

==Awards and honors==
*[[Lambda Literary Award]] for Gay Men's Biography/Autobiography for ''My Own Country'' (1995)<ref>{{cite web |author1=Antonio Gonzalez Cerna |title=7th Annual Lambda Literary Awards |url=https://www.lambdaliterary.org/winners-finalists/07/14/lambda-literary-awards-1994/ |date=July 14, 1995}}</ref>
*[[Wellcome Book Prize]] Shortlist for ''Cutting for Stone'' (2009)
*[[Heinz Awards|Heinz Award]] in the Arts and Humanities (2014)<ref>{{Cite web|last=|first=|date=|title=Heinz Awards - Abraham Verghese|url=http://www.heinzawards.net/recipients/abraham-verghese|url-status=live|archive-url=|archive-date=|access-date=|website=}}</ref>
* [[National Humanities Medal]] (2015)

==See also==
{{Portal|Biography}}
* [[Physician writer]]

==References==
{{reflist}}

==External links==
*{{twitter}}
* [http://www.abrahamverghese.com/ Abraham Verghese Web Site]
* [http://med.stanford.edu/profiles/frdActionServlet?choiceId=facProfile&fid=8374#publications Stanford Profile]
* [http://www.visiblelegacy.com/?p=d&q=FMI:8307 Abraham Verghese's Profile] at [http://www.visiblelegacy.com/?p=h Visible Legacy]
* [http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Verghese.html Emory postcolonial studies biography]
* [http://deimos3.apple.com/WebObjects/Core.woa/Browse/itunes.stanford.edu.1291767037.01291767042.1797021606?i=1881672530 Abraham Verghese discussing bedside medicine (podcast)]{{dead link|date=October 2016 |bot=InternetArchiveBot |fix-attempted=yes }}
* {{TED speaker}}

{{Authority control}}

{{DEFAULTSORT:Verghese, Abraham}}
[[Category:Physicians from Tennessee]]
[[Category:Ethiopian emigrants to the United States]]
[[Category:Stanford University School of Medicine faculty]]
[[Category:American male writers of Indian descent]]
[[Category:American people of Malayali descent]]
[[Category:East Tennessee State University alumni]]
[[Category:Iowa Writers' Workshop alumni]]
[[Category:Living people]]
[[Category:1955 births]]
[[Category:Madras Medical College alumni]]
[[Category:Lambda Literary Award winners]]
[[Category:American people of Indian descent in health professions]]
[[Category:American male essayists]]
[[Category:National Humanities Medal recipients]]

Abraham Verghese - Revision history

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