Abraham Verghese

Abraham Verghese, M.D., is a noted Indian-American doctor and author.

His family originates from Kerala, India. He was raised in Ethiopia where his parents along with hundreds of Keralites and Tamils from India worked as teachers. Many countries in Africa (Nigeria, Zambia, etc.) and Asia (Malaysia, etc.) witnessed similar inflows of teachers and nurses from Kerala given the absolute lack of employment opportunities in their homeland, and the relatively high levels of education amongst Keralites, especially amongst the Syrian Christians like the Verghese family. These communities led uncertain lives in these host countries as they possessed neither the political clout of white expatriates nor the economic clout of long-settled minorities such the Chinese in S E Asia or the Lebanese in Africa to buffer them from localization programs or political upheavals.

Following the overthrow of the royal family in Ethiopia, circumstances changed for the worse for the Indian community. Abraham had begin medical college in Ethiopia, but was forced to return to India to pick up the threads of this medical education there. He came to Madras where his brother, George, was enrolled in the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras. In the meantime, his parents had managed to immigrate to the United States. Following a tortuous route, he managed to complete his medical degree (MBBS) from Madras, and joined his parents in the US as one of thousands of foreign medical graduates from India seeking open residency positions here. As he describes it in his book, these FMGs (foreign medial graduates) specialized in the unpopular, unglamorous specialties like infectious diseases, etc. He obtained a post in rural Tennessee where he encountered the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s and 1990s. He wrote a bestselling book called My Own Country: A Doctor's Story about his experiences in displacement, diaspora, responses to foreignness and the human lives affected by the AIDS epidemic; it was later made into a movie by Mira Nair with Lost (TV series)'s star Naveen Andrews playing his role.

His second book,The Tennis Partner, deals with physician drug abuse and the death of a friend.

Links

 * SAJA biography
 * Emory postcolonial studies biography