Abraham Verghese

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Abraham Verghese, M.D., is a noted Indian-American doctor and author.

His family originates from Kerala, India. He was born and raised in Ethiopia where his parents, along with hundreds of Keralites from India, worked as teachers. He is a Syro-Malabar Orthodox Christian^[1]

Following the overthrow of the Imperial rule in Ethiopia, circumstances changed for the worse for the Indian community. Abraham had begun medical college in Ethiopia, but was forced to return to India to pick up the threads of this medical education there. He came to Madras where his brother, George, was enrolled in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. In the meantime, his parents had managed to immigrate to the United States. Following a tortuous route, he managed to complete his medical degree (MBBS) from Madras, and joined his parents in the US as one of thousands of foreign medical graduates from India seeking open residency positions here. As he describes it in his book, these FMGs (foreign medical graduates) specialized in unpopular, unglamorous specialties such as infectious diseases. He obtained a post in Johnson City, Tennessee where he encountered the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. He wrote a bestselling book called My Own Country: A Doctor's Story about his experiences in displacement, diaspora, responses to foreignness and the human lives affected by the AIDS epidemic; it was later made into a movie by Mira Nair with Lost star Naveen Andrews playing his role.

His second book,The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss, deals with physician drug abuse and the death of a friend. He is working on a new book, a novel, called "Cutting for Stone" which is expected to be published in January 2009.[1]

As of December 2007 Verghese is Senior Associate Chair for the new program in the Theory and Practice of Medicine at Stanford University. Prior to that he served for five years as Director of the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas.[2]