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Bestselling Author/Physician Now Calls Stanford Home

Business Wire, May 6, 2008

Abraham Verghese Plans to Help Students, Doctors Realize the Healing Power of a Touch

STANFORD, Calif. -- The guest speaker, Abraham Verghese, MD, looked in with surprise at the dozen people seated in the public affairs office. "I thought this was a one-on-one meeting," said Verghese, who was newly recruited to the Stanford University School of Medicine to raise the profile of clinical training.

Then he walked around the room and shook hands with each person, quietly introducing himself. So no, it was not a one-on-one meeting--but Verghese made it seem like one for a moment.

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A bestselling author and champion of hands-on medicine, Verghese arrived at Stanford in December to serve as professor of medicine and senior associate chair for the new program in the theory and practice of medicine.

Ralph Horwitz, MD, chair of Stanford's Department of Medicine, said he had worked to recruit Verghese ever since the physician-writer spoke at Yale University grand rounds in 2001. Horwitz heard Verghese read from his first book, My Own Country, about his experiences as a young doctor in rural Tennessee at the beginning of the AIDS epidemic.

Verghese's stories lay bare the daily intensity of medical work along with large swaths of his own personal life.

"Abraham speaks quietly. The auditorium became quieter and quieter as people were straining to hear," said Horwitz. "It was an example of the power of talking softly but with great meaning and importance."

Horwitz, at that time chair of Yale's department of medicine, was also impressed by Verghese's clinical skills during that visit. "Abraham is a master clinician. And he speaks very powerfully about the craft of medicine and reminds us of its importance," said Horwitz.

Verghese is accomplished in multiple ways. Board certified in three specialties--internal medicine, pulmonary diseases and infectious diseases--he is widely published in scientific literature and also writes for the popular press. My Own Country was a finalist in the 1994 National Book Critic's Circle Awards and made into a movie; his second book, The Tennis Partner, was a bestseller. It traces his friendship with a medical student dogged by drug addiction.

"One of my goals is to position us as the most intellectually vibrant department of medicine in the United States. I want this department to be engaged in a noisy but civil discourse on the future of medicine and I think that Abraham will be an important contributor," said Horwitz.

His previous position was at the University of Texas in San Antonio, where for five years he directed the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics.

"Though I enjoyed setting up the center, I found I most enjoyed being a clinician. It's clear that is my first love," he said. "There really is no greater privilege for me than caring for patients at the bedside, and it is the place to convey to students the excitement of internal medicine."

This one-on-one between physician and patient should be at the heart of medical care, said Verghese. At the University of Texas, he encouraged students and doctors to use writing to bring their feelings about these relationships to the surface. In his own writing he has described his distress that in modern medicine these relationships get short shrift.

"Medicine's never been more potent, and yet we have this paradox--I don't think patients have ever been more dissatisfied," he said. "To the patient, it can seem impersonal. It's almost as if the patient in the bed is a mere icon for the real patient in the computer. I'm not a Luddite but I do think technology and fragmentation of care can get out of hand."

He told a story of an acquaintance in Texas. The woman had breast cancer and left town for treatment at a world-class center. Then Verghese discovered she was back and asked why. "She said, 'Everything was fabulous, valet parking, beautiful grounds, the latest protocols.... But no one really examined my breast. At best it was cursory.' You could argue they hardly needed to examine her breast at that point; they had her scanned inside and out. But it was important to her. It reflected a kind of inattention," said Verghese. "This is the problem we are up against. If we don't exercise the privilege of putting our hands on people and examining them carefully, we lose something therapeutically and we lose credibility."

Verghese began his medical education in Ethiopia, where he was born in 1955 to South Indian parents. Leaving Ethiopia in the wake of a coup d'etat, he moved to the United States, where he worked in New Jersey as an orderly, and then to India where he finished his medical education at Madras Medical College. He returned to the United States in 1980, entering a residency program at East Tennessee State University in Johnson City, and completed infectious disease training at Boston City Hospital. In 1985, he returned to Johnson City for a position at the Veterans Administration hospital and an appointment as assistant professor at East Tennessee State University School of Medicine.

Business Services Industry

Bestselling Author/Physician Now Calls Stanford Home

Business Wire, May 6, 2008

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