There's a quiet dignity that envelopes Abraham Verghese, MD. You can imagine other authors whose books have scaled to the top to be taken with themselves, hardly humble, but that's not the case here. When you get to know him, you realize he's a man of great depth, with a wonderful soul and a deeply felt sense of humanity. When he talks about treating patients it's with reverence ("There’s a saintliness I saw in so many of my patients," he told me) - as if each time he crosses the threshold into a patient's room he's entering hallowed ground.
Verghese has written two searing works of nonfiction: My Own Country, a paean to the young men he treated for HIV-AIDS when it was just emerging as a human scourge, and The Tennis Partner, a loving eulogy to a best buddy whose life went off the rails. Then the blockbuster novel Cutting for Stone: atop the New York Times best seller list for two years and selling more than one million copies. It's a sweeping tale of how time transforms family - jolting the reader from the first page, where a Roman Catholic nun gives birth to twins boys and dies on the operating table. I read it during the height of the global economic chaos in 2009 and was transported each evening, thankfully, to another world outside of monetary meltdowns and fiscal maelstrom.
In this 1:2:1 podcast, Verghese and I talk about time's impact on medicine, novels and life. (Time is the theme of the current issue of Stanford Medicine magazine.) About life, he tells me, "There's a poignancy to living because we won't live forever… As John Irving says in one of his books, 'Life is a terminal condition. It's about to run out on all of us...' There's no exception to that. And I think, in a way, that's what makes life so beautiful."
This podcast is accompanied by a Q&A with Verghese in the magazine.
Previously: Stanford Medicine magazine reports on time’s intersection with health, Abraham Verghese discusses stealing metaphors and the language of medicine at TEDMED, Stanford’s Abraham Verghese honored as both author and healer, Abraham Verghese’s Cutting for Stone: Two years as a New York Times best seller and Abraham Verghese at Work: A New York Times profile
Photo by Jason Henry
