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The first book by a doctor who works with AIDS victims daily offers a revealing look at the impact of AIDS on a small Tennessee town, as townspeople respond to the disease's presence in inspiring ways.
- Sales Rank: #581771 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Simon n Schuster
- Published on: 1994-05-10
- Ingredients: Example Ingredients
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 9.75" h x 6.50" w x 1.00" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 352 pages
Features
From Publishers Weekly
When infectious-disease specialist Verghese, the Ethiopian-born son of Indian schoolteachers, emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Johnson City, Tenn., in the mid-1980s, he finally felt at peace "in my own country" at last. But his work at the Johnson City Medical Center soon led him into a shadow world of Bible-belt AIDS, often without the support of his colleagues. Verghese discovered a local gay community that was then untested for the HIV virus. If revealed, these people's closeted relationships would have, writes Verghese, made them stand out "like Martians." The author tells the stories of several patients, including the gay man who must reconcile with his father and the "innocent" man who has contracted AIDS through a contaminated blood transfusion but who, concerned about society's response to his plight, keeps his disease a secret even though he believes that "this thing, this virus, is from hell, from the devil himself." Verghese reveals his own confusions about homosexuality, immigrant identity and his wife's fears about his health. Writing with an outsider's empathy and insight, casting his chronicle in graceful prose, he offers a memorable tale that both captures and transcends time and place. Paperback rights to Vintage; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In fall 1985 Verghese--who was born in Ethiopia of Indian parents--returned with his wife and newborn son to Johnson City, Tennessee, where he had done his internship and residence. As he watched AIDS infect the small town, he and the community learned many things from one another, including the power of compassion. An AIDS expert who initially had no patients, Verghese describes meeting gay men and then eventually others struggling with this new disease. Verghese's patients include a factory worker confronting her husband's AIDS, bisexuality, and her own HIV status and a religious couple infected via a blood transfusion attempting to keep their disease secret from their church and their children. This novelistic account, occasionally overly detailed, provides a heartfelt perspective on the American response to the spread of AIDS. Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 1/94.
- James E. Van Buskirk, San Francisco P . L .
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Infectious disease specialist Verghese is a Christian from subcontinental India who earned his M.D. in Ethiopia, and living in various cultures has helped him to be open-minded toward and supportive of his patients, who currently are the veterans and civilians living in and around Johnson City in east Tennessee. His book covers the five years in the latter 1980s when AIDS began to make itself felt in the area and during which he treated gays, victims of tainted transfusions, and infected spouses. Among the book's fascinating features are its portrayals of the gradually increasing impact of AIDS on the community, the changing relationships between Verghese and other health caregivers and the patients, and the frightening toll the disease took on families, friends, and society. Nor were Verghese himself, his wife, and even his children immune to those grinding forces. Few, if any, books written by someone without AIDS have offered such a perceptive and realistic perspective on this disease and its ramifications. William Beatty
Most helpful customer reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
At first Verghese seems like an interested outsider
By Amazon Customer
In My Own Country is an autobiographical narrative of Dr. Abraham Verghese and his work as an infectious disease physician in rural Tennessee during the early years of the HIV pandemic. Verghese is a powerful writer, and his rendering of the AIDS crisis immortalizes the victims of the AIDS crisis in Johnson City. More than that, Verghese offers a rare perspective of the time—he starts out his story as little more than an outsider stumbling into an interesting medical phenomenon. He was not gay, had little connection with gay community, and was neither an advocate nor an enemy of gay men. Yet, over the course of the novel we see how their stories begin to envelope him. At first Verghese seems like an interested outsider, and we wonder if his fascination is purely medical. But when the young men come to him he learns their names, and he asks for their stories. Perhaps because he is a real foreigner in a place that has made them to feel foreign too, they open up to him. Giving his patients the opportunity to speak is one of the few medicines Verghese has. Medically speaking, he offers little in terms of real therapy. He becomes a doctor specializing in palliative care.
Over the course of the novel, Dr. Verghese shows his readers the immense role a physician can play in the lives of patients. His patients are dying. They are afraid. There is little he can do to ease these physical pains. But he is there for them. And it is clear that many of them feel a true patient-physician bond with him as he helps them navigate their journey from life to death. This isn’t an easy process for the patients dying of AIDS, or for Dr. Verghese.
As we see a community form around his perseverance to treat his patients with dignity, we also see how his job begins to overtake his life. As Verghese becomes indispensible to his patients, his relationship with his wife and family deteriorates. We feel for the doctor as he misses important moments in his personal life. We can feel how he is pulled in different directions. He needs to choose between his patients and his family. We see how he chooses his patients. By the end of the novel, it is clear that Dr. Verghese is burned out. His marriage is strained and he has nightmares about the infection that consumes his working hours. We end the book with the same uncertainty that he feels. It turns out that the doctor’s calling has drained his spirit.
The book ends with Dr. Verghese making an important discovery about the pattern of AIDS in rural areas, and deciding to leave Johnson city for somewhere new and more detached. It is a conclusion that fits the topic. This book is not just about a viral pandemic. It does a good job of detailing HIV before treatments, but it’s mostly about the evolution of an idealistic physician. Read this book if you’d like to understand how incurable diseases affect both patients and their healthcare providers. You’ll get a glimpse into the hidden and sometimes heart-wrenching world of doctor-patient relationships.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Appalachian Spring…
By John P. Jones III
…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 3x5 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.
0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Rural Frontline of AIDS From The Doctor's Perspective
By Tom
Abraham Verghese's story perfectly illustrates a variety of aspects of society ranging from Tennessee suburban culture to medical hierarchy. The cover story is the spread of HIV and AIDS from the cities. He meets a diverse array of patients that help to highlight the different victims of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. First there was Gordon, a young gay man returning back home to Tennessee after catching HIV from one of his partners in the big city of Atlanta. Then there were Ed and Bobby, a gay couple that had previously tried to remain heterosexual. Next was Vickie and Clyde, a married couple that got HIV from the husband's homosexual activities. A perfect example of "innocent" victims, were Will and Bess. Will was a successful businessman that got HIV through blood transfusions. He spread the infection to his wife through sexual intercourse. Another unfortunate victim was Norman, a hemophiliac that got HIV through one of his factor VIII injections. The personal story of each of these individuals help to show the true tragedy of the HIV and AIDS epidemic.
In the foreground of the HIV and AIDS story is Verghese's own battle against the medical establishment. The dire reality of the situation and lack of medical treatment brings up issues of euthanasia and DNR. In addition, Verghese's position as an infectious disease specialist reimburses him at a lower rate than the other specialists in his field. His role as almost a primary care giver leaves him dealing with the most stressful aspects of patient care.
My professor stated that this book could be viewed as a primary source document of the US HIV and AIDS epidemic. I agree 100%, Verghese's book with its colorful descriptions is a on-the-grounds narrative suited for the those looking into the HIV and AIDS fear years.
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