Saturday, June 4, 2011, at 2 p.m.

Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese. There is some brief biography at the front of the book, but also I found his website, where you can find out more about the man himself and his books and articles. From the website:

Born of Indian parents who were teachers in Ethiopia, he grew up near Addis Ababa and began his medical training there. When Emperor Haile Selassie was deposed, he briefly joined his parents who had moved to the United States, and worked as an orderly before returning to complete his medical education at Madras Medical College. he later retured to the U.S. for his residency as one of many foreign medical graduates. Like many other foreign medical graduates, he found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him, an experience he described in one of his early New Yorker articles, The Cowpath to America.

From Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was a resident from 1980 to 1983, he did his fellowship at Boston University School of Medicine, working at Boston City Hospital for two years. It was here that he first saw the early signs of the HIV epidemic and later, when he returned to Johnson City as an assistant professor of medicine, he saw the second epidemic, rural AIDS, and his life took the turn for which he is most well known -- his caring for numerous AIDS patients in an era when little could be done and helping them through their early and painful deaths was often the most a physician could do.

What does "cutting for stone" mean? I had to look up the origin of the phrase "cutting for stone," because it was obvious in the novel and from the various contexts in which it was used, that it had some cultural reference outside of the novel itself. It turns out that it is from the Hippocratic Oath, "I will not cut for stone, even in patients in whom the disease is manifest..." which is widely interpreted as drawing a distinction between being a physician and being a surgeon and a proscription against a physician performing procedures for which he is not qualified, even if it seems like easy money.


Ethiopia and Eritrea

Those of us at the meeting last month, who had already started Cutting for Stone remarked about what a fascinating place Ethiopia sounded like, so I rounded up some pictures from the internet.

Addis Ababa: The modern capital of Ethiopia, the setting of much of the novel, and the city of Marion Stone's (and Dr. Verghese's) youth.






























Axum: The ancient capital of Ethopia and the location of the treasury which houses what is claimed to be the original Ark of the Covenant. The first picture is the old St. Mary's church. The subsequent pictures are from in or near the new St. Mary's church (built by Haile Selassie). The last picture is of the treasury.





























Lalibela: This is the site of ancient churches carved from the surrounding rock hills. The last picture is the largest church in the world carved out of a single piece of stone.



































Eritrea: Now a sovereign nation, in the novel it was part of Ethiopia, the homeland of Rosina and Genet, and the country of rebels.

































Tizita (see pages 227 and 228): This is the song that Almaz sang as young Marion held her breast. It is the song that is synonymous with Ethiopia to the older Marion as he is living in the United States. As it says in the book, there are many versions. This is my favorite of the versions I found on YouTube.