23 Facts About Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese was born on 1955 and is an American physician and author.

Abraham Verghese is the co-host with Eric Topol of the Medscape podcast Medicine and the Machine.

In 2011, Verghese was elected a member of the Institute of Medicine.

Abraham Verghese was born in Ethiopia to Orthodox Christian parents from Kerala, India, who worked as teachers.

Abraham Verghese has three children: two sons from his first marriage and a third from his second marriage.

Abraham Verghese's elder brother, George Verghese, is an engineering professor at MIT and his younger brother, Phil Verghese, is a former software engineer at Google.

Abraham Verghese left the country and joined his parents, who had emigrated to America.

Abraham Verghese went to India to complete his medical studies at Madras Medical College and was awarded a Bachelor of Medicine degree from Madras University in 1979, finishing an internship there.

Abraham Verghese worked for two years at Boston City Hospital, where he encountered the early signs of the urban HIV epidemic.

In 1991 Abraham Verghese accepted a position as Professor of Medicine and Chief of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Texas Tech Health Sciences Center in El Paso, Texas Despite his title, he was the sole infectious disease physician at Thomason Hospital.

Abraham Verghese was awarded the Grover E Murray Distinguished Professorship of Medicine at the Texas Tech School of Medicine.

Eleven years later, Abraham Verghese became founding Director of The Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics at the University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.

Overwhelmed by the nature of his work with his AIDS patients in Tennessee, and with his first marriage under strain, Abraham Verghese joined the Iowa Writers Workshop at the University of Iowa.

Abraham Verghese cashed in his retirement plan and his tenured position to move to Iowa City with his young family.

Abraham Verghese ponders themes of displacement, diaspora, responses to foreignness and the many individuals and families affected by the AIDS epidemic.

Abraham Verghese has said the insights he gained from this work helped him to become a more empathic physician and resulted in the motto, "Imagining the Patient's Experience", that defined his later work.

Abraham Verghese's focus in San Antonio was developing medical humanities as a way to preserve doctors' innate empathy and sensitivity.

Abraham Verghese developed a formal humanities and ethics curriculum integrated into all four years of the medical school program.

Abraham Verghese invited medical students to accompany him on bedside rounds as a way of demonstrating his conviction in the value of the physical examination in diagnosing patients and in developing a caring, two-way patient-doctor relationship that benefits not only patients and their families but the physician.

Abraham Verghese has written articles for medical journals such as The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, The Lancet, and The American Journal of Medicine.

Abraham Verghese has contributed to general-interest publications like The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Atlantic, The New York Times, Granta, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.

Abraham Verghese has written four books based on his life experiences and his medical knowledge.

Abraham Verghese is often asked to speak about his ideas on medical care and about his life story and his books.