Select delivery location
See All Buying Options
Amazon book clubs early access
Loading your book clubs
There was a problem loading your book clubs. Please try again.
Not in a club? Learn more
Amazon book clubs early access

Join or create book clubs

Choose books together

Track your books
Bring your club to Amazon Book Clubs, start a new book club and invite your friends to join, or find a club that’s right for you for free.
Explore Amazon Book Clubs
Kindle app logo image

Download the free Kindle app and start reading Kindle books instantly on your smartphone, tablet, or computer - no Kindle device required.

Read instantly on your browser with Kindle for Web.

Using your mobile phone camera - scan the code below and download the Kindle app.

QR code to download the Kindle App

Follow the author

Abraham Verghese
Follow
Something went wrong. Please try your request again later.

My Own Country : A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS Paperback – January 1, 1994

by Abraham Verghese (Author)
4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,134 ratings
See all formats and editions
A Doctor's storyof a town and its people in the age of Aids
Previous page
  1. Language
    English
  2. Publisher
    Simon & Schuster
  3. Publication date
    January 1, 1994
  4. ISBN-10
    0671785141
  5. ISBN-13
    978-0671785147
  6. See all details
Next page
All the Little Raindrops: A Novel
"All the Little Raindrops: A Novel" by Mia Sheridan for $10.39
The chilling story of the abduction of two teenagers, their escape, and the dark secrets that, years later, bring them back to the scene of the crime. | Learn more

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B003LJTYTA
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster; First Edition (January 1, 1994)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0671785141
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0671785147
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.6 ounces
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 1,134 ratings

About the author

Follow authors to get new release updates, plus improved recommendations.
Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese

Brief content visible, double tap to read full content.
Full content visible, double tap to read brief content.

ABRAHAM VERGHESE is the Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor and Vice Chair of Medicine, Stanford University School of Medicine. He sees patients, teaches students, and writes.

From 1990 to 1991, Abraham Verghese attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop at The University of Iowa, where he obtained a Master of Fine Arts degree.

His first book, MY OWN COUNTRY, about AIDS in rural Tennessee, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for 1994 and was made into a movie directed by Mira Nair and starring Naveen Andrews, Marisa Tomei, Glenne Headley and others.

His second book, THE TENNIS PARTNER, was a New York Times notable book and a national bestseller.

His third book, CUTTING FOR STONE was an epic love story, medical story and family saga. It appeared in hardback in 2009, and is in its 9th printing and is being translated into 16 languages. It is a Vintage paperback and was on the New York Times bestseller list for over 110 weeks at this writing.

His latest novel, THE COVENANT OF WATER, is forthcoming from Grove Press (May 2, 2023).

Verghese has honorary degrees from five universities and has published extensively in the medical literature, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, Sports Illustrated, The Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Granta, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, and elsewhere. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. He was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Obama in 2016.

His writing, both non-fiction and fiction, has to do with his view of medicine as a passionate and romantic pursuit; he sees the bedside skill and ritual of examining the patient as critical, cost saving, time-honored and necessary, though it is threatened in this technological age. He coined the term the 'iPatient' to describe the phenomenon of the virtual patient in the computer becoming the object of attention to the detriment of the real patient in the bed. His is an important voice for humanism in medicine and for anticipating the unwanted consequences of new technologies before they are introduced.

Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
4.5 out of 5
1,134 global ratings
Such a great read!!!
5 Stars
Such a great read!!!
Verghese, A. (1995). My own country: A doctor’s story. Vintage Books.Abraham Verghese MD, MACP, is Professor and Linda R. Meier and Joan F. Lane Provostial Professor, and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. Verghese first came to the United States from Ethiopia in 1973. By 1980, he had completed medical school in India arriving in the United States as a "rookie doctor" assigned to Boson where he encountered his first AIDS patient. An infectious disease specialist, he read an article in 1981 about AIDS related pneumonia in homosexual men. Upon completion of his internship in Boston, Verghese landed at East Tennessee State University, Mountain Home Veterans Administration Medical center and the Johnson City Medical Center located in Johnson City, Tennessee. He noted how city and county hospitals were "the traditional postgraduate training rounds for foreign medical graduates," also how, "Going from India to Johnson City, TN, had been a bit of a culture shock." This memoir offers a glimpse of what it means to be a foreign doctor working a rural town during the emergence of the AIDS epidemic. He eloquently tells the stories of people who grew up in Johnson City, TN and returned after they contracted HIV. His stories illuminate what it means to be gay in a small town, the codes of silence and secrecy, and how families, churches, community members and members of the medical community respond to learning that a person is gay or that they have HIV. Gathering patient histories, he learns a great deal about practices and choices within the gay lifestyle. In the absence of prescription drugs, you observe a doctor trying to figure out treatment approaches sometimes unsure as to what effect. In 1989, he analyzed his patients which revealed that outside of those with HIV due to illness related blood transfusions or who contracted HIV due to a spouse's behavior, gay men exhibited a unique paradigm of "voyage away from East Tennessee, migration to urban living, and return home" which ended in death. He described this paradigm as a "story of how a generation of young men, raised to self-hatred, had risen above the definitions that their society and upbringings had used to define them. It was the story of the hard and sometimes lonely journeys they took far from home into a work more complicated than they imagined and far more dangerous than anyone could know."An outcome of my dissertation journey was the realization that research often focuses on urban areas. This book would be a super read for those interested in rural sociology because it offers a poignant glimpse into the life of a rural town at the emergence of HIV and AIDS epidemic. His stories about people experiencing HIV and the painful progression of the AIDS virus were so beautiful. I don't know of many books that give us this firsthand view. Such a good read.
Hide
Thank you for your feedback
Sorry, there was an error
Sorry we couldn't load the review

Top reviews from the United States

R. M. Peterson
5.0 out of 5 stars AIDS and broadening one's horizons of humanity
Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2017
Verified Purchase
Abraham Verghese is a physician, a specialist in internal medicine and infectious diseases. His medical training was in Ethiopia and India. He came to the United States as an FMG (foreign medical graduate). After finishing his residency and a fellowship, he settled in Johnson City, Tennessee in 1985. Because of his work in Boston, he was the most knowledgeable doctor in the Johnson City area about AIDS, but AIDS was not yet present when he arrived. Four years later, when he left Johnson City, there had been dozens of deaths from AIDS and he had over eighty HIV-infected persons under his care. Johnson City, with its 50,000 residents, had a hundred-fold more cases than the CDC would have predicted for it. MY OWN COUNTRY is Verghese's account of his four years in Johnson City, Tennessee, fighting an ever-mushrooming battle with AIDS and coming to love a corner of Appalachia.

Two subjects predominate. One, of course, is AIDS. The book is studded with case studies, as Verghese sees a wide array of the insidious ways in which AIDS manifests itself and kills. Most of his patients had obtained HIV elsewhere and had moved back to the Johnson City area once they became ill. Acquisition for most was via unprotected homosexual contact, but for a few it was through tainted blood or plasma or via heterosexual intercourse. The disease was hellish in and of itself, but often the social ripple effects were also dreadful -- from contempt and rejection on the part of family members and community, to refusals to treat by doctors and dentists, to boycotting by undertakers. As Verghese writes, "I was improvising constantly to deal with the moral, ethical and social subtleties that were so much a part of this disease."

The second principal subject involves medical practice in general in this country. When Verghese chose to specialize in infectious diseases, he relegated himself to second-tier status among his physician colleagues, especially financially. Medicine was transforming itself into a get-rich business, and the big money was in conducting processes and performing procedures, as opposed to diagnosing patients and being their primary care physician. As Verghese came to realize, proper treatment often required a holistic approach, which in turn required an understanding of the dynamics of the patient's relationships with family, friends, and community. In the thirty years since, the economics of medicine has gotten more out-of-control, and the quality of medical care has decreased. Even in 1985, many of the doctors and medical staff in rural hospitals and in urban public hospitals were foreign-trained, working in the U.S. with visas. If the U.S. continues to insulate itself from the world at large, how will these roles be filled in the future?

Verghese, however, does not harp on these and other social/medical policy issues or become preachy. Foremost, MY OWN COUNTRY contains umpteen different tales of human suffering and endurance, surprisingly often heroic and dignified in nature. For every incident of contempt and rejection, there is one of care and compassion. Two heroes in particular stand out -- Essie Vines, who cared and advocated for her brother Gordon, and Fred Goodson, who did likewise for his partner Otis Jackson and also was the principal organizer and force behind the local AIDS-support group. Anecdotally, there are a handful of intriguing "human interest" stories, such as "John Doe", a debilitated old man with a stroke, diabetes and pneumonia who had been left at the emergency room entrance while the family went to "park the car" and were never seen again; or Vickie McCray, who got HIV from her husband, who unbeknownst to her often had had sex with a male friend from his youth and then went on to give the virus to Vickie's sister as well (Vickie told Verghese that "ever since I found out he has AIDS, I've been feeling too sorry for him to be angry with him. No one deserves to be sick lik'at. No one deserves to lose their mind lik'at.").

MY OWN COUNTRY is not a perfect book. At times, Verghese goes too far down rabbit trails of marginal relevancy (especially when he describes geography and the routes from one place to another); the book is a tad manipulative; occasionally Verghese, although a truly remarkable person, comes across as a little holier-than-thou; and the sentimental reference to "my own country" seems a wee bit hypocritical given that Verghese left the Johnson City area after four years, never to live there again.

That said, and even though the book now is over twenty years old, MY OWN COUNTRY deserves to be read. It is interesting throughout, it is very readable, and reading it will surely broaden almost everyone's horizons of humanity.
24 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report
John P. Jones III
5.0 out of 5 stars Appalachian Spring…
Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2017
Verified Purchase
…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.
10 people found this helpful
Helpful
 Report

Top reviews from other countries

Haime
5.0 out of 5 stars Great book
Reviewed in Germany on April 24, 2024
Verified Purchase
Delivery took a bit of time but got there. Worth the wait. Excellent book .. easy read
Report
Hamsila Samuel Rajan
5.0 out of 5 stars Gripping..
Reviewed in India on November 20, 2017
Verified Purchase
The bone chilling details, anguish of the patients and the doctors, the stigma are so vividly portrayed.. you want to know more..
One person found this helpful
 Report
Amazon Customer
5.0 out of 5 stars Dr Verghese - Eloquent, extraordinarily compassionate, likeable and highly intelligent person. This book exceeded all expectations.
Reviewed in Australia on September 7, 2018
Verified Purchase
Abraham Verghese goes from strength to strength when it comes to impressing me.    I first became a fan when I read the Foreword he wrote for Paul Kalanithi's memoir When Breath Becomes Air.    This was soon topped by his fabulous novel Cutting For Stone - one of my all time favourites.    Having such high expectations I briefly worried whether I might be disappointed with  My Own Country: A Doctors Story.   Incredibly it surpassed my expectations on so many levels.   Not only is this man eloquent but he comes across as an extraordinarily compassionate, likeable and highly intelligent person.  

As an Infectious Diseases specialist in the 1980's Dr Abraham             Verghese became the go-to guy for all things HIV/AIDS in Johnson City, Tennessee and surrounding regions.  At this time in country America AIDS was a new and terrifying disease.   It was largely unknown and, if they thought of it at all, most people considered it the homosexuals disease.   The adage there are two sides to every story is quite incorrect in this case.   In the HIV/AIDS story there are so many elements and Dr Verghese captured all of them in a heartwarming and at times heartbreaking manner.  Introducing readers to patients who'd acquired the disease in various ways - gay men via unproteted sex;  females via their husbands or lovers,  haempheliacs and surgical patients via blood transfusions -  he showed the different ways the disease manifested and tore through their bodies.    He shared examples of the grief experienced by patients and their families at diagnosis then later upon their loved ones passing.   He incorporated the good, the bad and the ugly of societal attitudes.   Stigmatisation born of fear <i> "naked, ignorant and shameful prejudice"</i> at the hands of  assorted health professionals (this was the real shocker) dentists, pharmacists even morticians.        Yet he also managed to incorporate examples of tremendous support and positive stories about the ways in which the illness had helped bridged chasms within families and strengthened community spirit.     He forced readers to consider their own attitudes by contemplating the concept of guilt versus innocence (For example did the words "innocent victim" come to mind when I mentioned the patients infected by blood transfusion?).    Layer by layer he revealed the burdens and costs of this disease in a highly readable and informative manner.

If you've stuck with me this far you must surely have noticed I'm somewhat in awe of Dr Abraham Verghese and congratulate him on producing a book I can highly recommend without hesitation.
Report
Dianna Armstrong
5.0 out of 5 stars A doctor's perspective to AIDS epidemic
Reviewed in Canada on June 29, 2014
Verified Purchase
My Own Country is an account of a doctor in rural Tennessee. He is an infectious disease specialist who has such compassion for his AIDS patients. Many of his patients moved to the big cities of the US to be able to live and express themselves as gay men. Most are afraid of the repercussions of telling their families and friends the truth. They come back home when they are too sick to look after themselves. Dr. Verghese takes them under his wing and treats them best he can. A very moving and compelling story of the patients' history and the doctors frustration of seeing his patients suffer through the disease. A story of the AIDS epidemic from another perspective.
Report
lynniemilano
5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderful book
Reviewed in Italy on March 1, 2013
Verified Purchase
This is a beautiful memoir by a great writer and reading it and understanding Verghese's own journey as a doctor adds another layer of depth to his great novel Cutting for Stone.
Report