My Own Country Pdf Summary Reviews By Abraham Verghese

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My Own Country Pdf Summary

By the bestselling author of Cutting for Stone, a story of medicine in the American heartland, and confronting one’s deepest prejudices and fears.
Nestled in the Smoky Mountains of eastern Tennessee, the town of Johnson City had always seemed exempt from the anxieties of modern American life. But when the local hospital treated its first AIDS patient, a crisis that had once seemed an urban problem had arrived in the town to stay.
Working in Johnson City was Abraham Verghese, a young Indian doctor specializing in infectious diseases. Dr. Verghese became by necessity the local AIDS expert, soon besieged by a shocking number of male and female patients whose stories came to occupy his mind, and even take over his life. Verghese brought a singular perspective to Johnson City: as a doctor unique in his abilities; as an outsider who could talk to people suspicious of local practitioners; above all, as a writer of grace and compassion who saw that what was happening in this conservative community was both a medical and a spiritual emergency.”

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My Own Country Review

John P. Jones III

TOP 500 REVIEWERVINE VOICE

5.0 out of 5 stars Appalachian Spring…
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2017

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…summer, fall, and winter. The four seasons. Attune to all, because one has decided to pause long enough in life’s journeys to call one small piece of the earth “home,” as in, “my own country.”

The proverbial butterfly wings of the chaos theory launched two vectors whose paths were so highly improbable. A man leaves his home in Galilee, whom the world would call St. Thomas, and convinces many in a coastal part of India known as Kerala to become adherents of a new religion. As a result, that area would always have a much higher literacy rate, the initial prerequisite to become a teacher, even an expat one in Africa. Abraham Verghese’s parents were teachers in Ethiopia, where he was born, and given his Christian name. The overthrow of Haile Selassie in Verghese’s birthplace required him to flee. He came to America, worked as an orderly in a big city hospital, would finish his medical training to become a doctor in Madras (now Chennai). A sliver of the American medial leadership convinced itself it would be best NOT to be self-sufficient in medical humanpower; rather foreign labor should be imported, and hence what Verghese calls the “cowpath” was created: Indians, but also other nationals would become “the drones,” as he calls them, of the medical establishment, initially working in the inner city big city hospitals. After “bootcamp,” the “drones” were free to disperse across America, with many going to small towns in the rural areas. Many Indians praised the natural beauty and small town life around Johnson City, Tennessee; Verghese was primarily attracted to the area because he liked the people. He obtained a post, and would live on the bucolic campus of the Veterans Administration Home there.

The second vector commenced in Central Africa sometime shortly after the First World War, when, based on genetic studies, it appears that the virus known as HIV would cross the species barrier from monkeys and/or gorillas and enter a human. For 4-5 decades, the virus never gained enough traction to become an epidemic; people simply would die of unknown “tropical diseases.” Shortly after independence from Belgium, the Congo would be forced to import teachers since their former colonial masters never trained enough. The government of the Congo brought them from Haiti. (See The Origins of AIDS ). As Verghese notes: gays watched from the sidelines while heterosexuals enjoyed their “sexual revolution” in the 1960’s. They decided to commence their own in the 1970’s, and the warmth of Haiti made it a gay resort destination. Very Bad timing.

The two vectors would cross in the summer of 1985, when a very sick man tried to make it back to his own country – of birth and upbringing – from his home in New York City. He made it to the Emergency Room instead, and became Patient #1 of the AIDS epidemic hitting Johnson City. Verghese is in the ER with his parents. The father, always having been in denial, and now enraged, asks: “Is my son a queer?” Verghese reports the mother’s reaction: “She gazed at the floor, nodding slowly, confirming what she had always known.”

And that is one of the many strengths of this seminal account of the early days of the AIDS epidemic. The author has the very keen eye of an internist, a clinician who is trained to carefully observe the human body for signs of anomalies. He uses that keen eye on the human spirit, at the time it is under duress, as in life-and-death matters. He says that he is: “…a doctor, a scientist, trained in professional detachment, but all the usual postures seemed satirical in the face of AIDS. I felt these deaths.” And he cried more than once, the proper reaction in the face of this devastating epidemic, to lose one’s “professional detachment.”

The author primary work is as a doctor at the Veterans Administration, treating, mainly old soldiers, who wear their lung cancer from smoking as a badge of honor. From this basic pedestrian clinical practice, Verghese becomes the “AIDS” doctor in Johnson City since he is the only internist. The 3×5 index cards on his patients are in his pocket, growing one by one. At the beginning, they are only male homosexuals. There are also two females who have been their partners. Then there is one couple, “pillars of the community,” who contracted HIV/AIDS at Duke Medical Center, from blood transfusions, weeks before the blood supply would be routinely tested. Awful timing, yet again. Likewise, there was a hemophiliac who contracted it from a batch of Factor VIII, which was so often produced from Haitian blood donors. After five years, Verghese will have more than 80 such cards, more than 80 heart-rending stories.

The author describes the medicine involved, and the reactions of medical personnel. He told the very human stories behind 10-20 of his patients. He relates the varying reactions of relatives, and other members of the community. He describes his own fears of catching the disease, and the increased tensions with his wife (and other members of the Indian community) because of his work. He sits with one of the patients at her single-wide trailer, and enjoys a smoke. He is introspective enough to wonder if he had treated the “pillars of the community” differently, because it was “not really their fault,” unlike the others, that segments of the community condemned for bringing down the wrath of god on their “lifestyle choices.” The author only lightly touches on the slow acknowledgment of this epidemic by President Reagan, the FDA, and other leading members of the medical and financial establishments.

After five years he was obviously burnt-out and decided to leave the place he previously had described as: “I suppose this is when you know that a town has become your town: where others see brick, a broken window, a boarded up storefront, you feel either moved to tears or to joy. The map of the town becomes the map of your memories, the grid on which you play out your obsessions…” His country, the heart of Appalachia.

At the end of 1989 Verghese picked up his temporary roots, and moved, with his family, to Iowa. I had started life in the Appalachian Mountains, and had followed other vectors. In 1989 I also picked up my temporary roots of ten years duration, in the deserts of Saudi Arabia. Three months before Verghese crossed into Iowa for the first time, I was in a one-month immersion French class in Villfranche-sur-mer, France. A small class of ten. The teacher was gay, and it became increasingly clear that he had AIDS, as did some of his friends. Utilizing his discretion, we had a one-hour class on AIDS – in French. He concluded the class by asking each of us the very pointed question. If this was a disease that impacted only the “haute bourgeoisie,” would we already have a cure? My answer was a straightforward: “Oui.” 6-stars for Verghese’s heart-rending and evocative account.

About Abraham Verghese Author Of My Own Country pdf Book

Abraham Verghese Author Of My Own Country pdf Book, MD, MACP, is Professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the Stanford University School of Medicine and Senior Associate Chair of the Department of Internal Medicine.

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 completed his training at Madras Medical College and went to the United States for his residency as one of many foreign medical graduates. Like many others, 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.

His work with terminal patients and the insights he gained from the deep relationships he formed and the suffering he saw were intensely transformative; they became the basis for his first book, My Own Country : A Doctor’s Story, written later during his years in El Paso, Texas. Such was his interest in writing that he decided to take some time away from medicine to study at the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa, where he earned a Master of Fine Arts degree in 1991. Since then, his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Atlantic, The New York Times, The New York Times Magazine, Granta, Forbes.com, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Following Iowa, he became professor of medicine and chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas, where he lived for the next 11 years. In addition to writing his first book, which was one of five chosen as Best Book of the Year by Time magazine and later made into a Mira Nair movie, he also wrote a second best-selling book, The Tennis Partner : A Story of Friendship and Loss, about his friend and tennis partner?s struggle with addiction. This was a New York Times’ Notable Book