Review of the book: My own Country

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My own Country

Author: Abraham Verghese

Publisher: Simon & Schuster, New York ,1995 Price: $13 Pages: 347

Reviewer: Chacko, susan@...

Abraham Verghese is a doctor of Indian origin, specializing in

infectious diseases. He grew up in Uganda, went to medical school in

India, and came to the United States in the late '70s. In the

early '80s he started working in small town in Tennessee. AIDS was

just beginning to be identified on the two coasts at that time, but

people in Tennessee thought of it as a big-city disease, and

certainly nothing that would affect them in this 'safe', 'wholesome'

corner of the American heartland.

Then the cases started tricking in -- a young gay man from New York

who came home to die, then a gay couple in the same town, then an

elderly heterosexual couple who had had blood transfusions before

the blood test was developed, then a woman whose husband, unknown to

her, was bisexual....within 2 years, he had a caseload of 50

patients in various stages of the disease.

The book is only partly about these patients -- most of it is about

his own reactions to the disease, to the patients, to gay and

straight people, to 'guilt' and 'innocence', his growing inability

to communicate with his wife...and the reverse as well -- the

reactions of the town to a foreign doctor, to AIDS, to gayness...the

indignity of the disease itself, and how the sufferers coped with

their illnesses and watched their loved ones die.

And the Indian medical community in Tennessee, their subtle

hierarchies, their parties, their opinion of his 'poor' choice in

medical specialities, and how he and his wife fitted into the Indian

and Tennesse social circles.

Sounds like a lot to have in one book, but that is the power of the

book -- it includes all the things that touched his life and shaped

him. Although it sounds grim, it really is not -- there are touches

of humour, and he writes about people with a clear vision which does

not skip lightly over their problems but does not ignore their

essentially human optimism.

It struck me that the response of small-town Tennessee to AIDS is

much like that of the Indian community, both in India and abroad --

they think of it as a disease that affects others. But AIDS is

growing rapidly in India, and many Indians in the U.S. are likely to

know someone who has been touched by the disease. Perhaps it is time

we examined our own thoughts about the disease and its patients, and

this book is a great place to start. It is a remarkable piece of

writing, and is highly recommended.

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