Biography of Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese was born in 1955 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, to Indian parents. The second of three brothers, Verghese grew up in Ethiopia and went on to study medicine there until Emperor Haile Selassie, who recruited Verghese's parents, was deposed. Escaping the ensuing political unrest, Verghese and his parents relocated to New Jersey in 1974, where Verghese worked in various medical settings, such as hospitals and nursing homes. Encountering racism and professional setbacks, Verghese describes this period of his life as “tumultuous” and hopeless, though these experiences paved the way for his future career as a physician, ethicist, and writer. To earn his medical degree, Verghese moved to India and studied at Madras Medical College before returning to the United States to complete his residency. Despite his myriad qualifications, Verghese was only able to find work in poorly funded hospitals in rural settings, such as Johnston, Tennessee, due to his Indian heritage and education, an inequality he wrote about in the 1997 New Yorker piece, “The Cowpath to America.”

In the early 1980s, Verghese was offered a fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine. Working at Boston City Hospital, he encountered the HIV and AIDS crisis before returning to Tennessee, where his rural hospital was overwhelmed with patients suffering from the autoimmune disease. Witnessing many painful, premature deaths left a lasting impact on Verghese, who explores this trauma and the meaning of healing in his writing. Unsatisfied with the ability of his scientific papers to accurately capture human suffering, Verghese turned to narrative writing. He attended the prestigious Iowa Writer’s Workshop in 1991, earning a MFA. He published articles in many national magazines, including The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and Forbes. His first book, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story, was published in 1994 and recounts Verghese’s experiences working with AIDS patients in Tennessee. The memoir was recognized on the New York Times Notable Book list and was later adapted into a made-for-television film. His next book, The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss, published in 1997, told the story of Verghese’s relationship with his tennis partner who eventually lost his life to drug addiction.

Verghese moved to El Paso, Texas, to serve as professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center. Though he felt at home in diverse El Paso, he left the city in 2002 for San Antonio, where he founded the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center. In this program, Verghese emphasized medical empathy and worked to combat apathy in doctors who often lose their passion for medicine due to professional burnout. Seeing the success of this program, Stanford University recruited Verghese in 2007 to serve as a tenured professor; later, he was named the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine. In a 2008 opinion piece published by the New England Journal of Medicine, Verghese calls for new doctors to create connections with patients to counter the increasingly industrialized, impersonal world of Western medicine, a topic that inspired his 2011 TED Talk. In 2009, he published his first novel, Cutting for Stone, which remained on the New York Times Bestseller List for two years. He received the Heinz Award in 2014 and the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama, in 2015. Today, Verghese continues to teach at Stanford Medical school. His 2023 novel, The Covenant of Water, was chosen as an Oprah’s Book Club selection and was optioned for film rights in 2024.