Acclaimed Physician Will Discuss Experiences Treating AIDS Patients

The Health, Policy, and Culture Speaker Series will be inaugurated with two free events centering on Abraham Verghese, a critically acclaimed author and professor of medicine at the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center. The first event, a screening of the film My Own Country, will take place on Tuesday, April 3, at 5:30 p.m. in Textor 102. The film, based on Verghese’s book of the same name, relates the author’s experiences treating AIDS patients in Johnson City, Tennessee, during the 1980s. On Wednesday, April 4, Verghese will give a lecture entitled "The Making of Meaning in a Medical Life" at 7:30 p.m. in Textor 102. He will also meet with students and conduct master classes.

Born in Ethiopia, Verghese completed medical school in India and in 1985 arrived in Johnson City, a quiet town in the hill country of Tennessee. His goal was to practice infectious medicine, but during the next four years he found himself dealing increasingly and finally exclusively with HIV and AIDS patients. My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS is the account of his patients’ struggles as well as his own involvement with a disease that he and many of the other residents of Johnson City had once thought was a big-city problem.

Verghese’s account shows the struggles of patients and their loved ones as they dealt not only with the disease but also with the societal prejudice that accompanied it. As Verghese became caught up in these dramas, he found himself drifting away from his wife, who felt shut out by her husband’s preoccupation with his patients’ lives. At the same time, he was confronted with the implications of AIDS for the practice of medicine.

"The early eighties," he wrote, "before AIDS had spun out of control, was a time of unreal and unparalleled confidence, bordering on conceit, in the Western medical world, in which doctors felt they had achieved mastery over the human body."

The fact that AIDS was cutting short so many lives while the medical profession watched helplessly forced Verghese to take a long, hard look at his profession.

"Many of us found ourselves crossing the traditional medical threshold and engaging with our patients, only because there was little else to do," he recently told an interviewer from Bookreporter. "In the process we discovered an amazing thing: we could bring a great deal of comfort to the soul — a ‘healing’ — even as the disease was ultimately victorious over the body."

My Own Country won the Lambda Literary Award and was named by Time magazine as one of the five best books of 1994. Verghese’s second book, The Tennis Partner: A Doctor’s Story of Friendship and Loss, deals with coming to terms with the death of his best friend and tennis partner, who committed suicide while trying to recover from a longtime cocaine habit.

The Health, Policy, and Culture Speaker Series is devoted to the interdisciplinary study of public health and medical issues around the world. It is sponsored by the Gerontology Institute, Office of Multicultural Affairs, Office of the Provost, Office of the President, and School of Health Sciences and Human Performance.

For more information call Stewart Auyash, associate professor and chair of the Department of Health Services Administration, at 274-1312.