THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, January 8, 1995 TAG: 9501030045
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J3 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY MARGAN ZAJDOWICZ
LENGTH: Medium: 52 lines
MY OWN COUNTRY
A Doctor's Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS
ABRAHAM VERGHESE
Simon & Schuster. 347 pp. $23.
MY OWN COUNTRY is an autobiographical account of Abraham Verghese, an Ethiopian-born Indian physician, trained in infectious diseases at Boston City Hospital, who went to the Veterans Administration Hospital in Johnson City, Tenn., to practice. Verghese thought that ``infectious diseases was the one discipline where cure was common. In the battle of man against microbe, man was winning.''
But in this beautiful setting at the foot of the Smoky Mountains, in the shadow of the Appalachian Trail, Verghese found out differently. He confronts AIDS, an ugly disease in any location, but one that seems particularly incongruous here.
Verghese writes of acceding to the secrecy demanded by a socially prominent patient who contracted HIV from a blood transfusion after surgery at Duke University, and of spending an evening in a gay bar in a vain effort to understand his gay patients better. He realizes his training never prepared him for the disease, for the intensity of the doctor-patient relationship and for the emotional neediness of the patients. Nothing is easy, truly effective or socially acceptable with AIDS. Even those who care for HIV patients feel tainted and stigmatized.
Eventually Verghese makes a terrible mistake, which nearly destroys him. He fails to maintain emotional distance between himself and his patients and loses track of who he is. His marriage disintegrates, and he realizes that he must leave. The reader is left wondering, as Verghese loads his family into an old station wagon for a trip to the University of Iowa for a ``cooling-off period,'' whether this fine physician will reconstitute his psyche, whether his marriage will survive and whether he will practice in infectious diseases again.
The book is beautifully written, the prose clear, incisive, shatteringly lovely. The flaw is in Verghese himself. Like a moth drawn to a flame, he gets too close and is nearly incinerated by this terrible disease. MEMO: Margan Zajdowicz, M.D., is a pediatric infectious-disease specialist who
lives in Norfolk. by CNB