Abraham C. Verghese

An infectious disease physician and a writer, Abraham Verghese is Senior Associate Chair, and Professor of the Theory and Practice of Medicine in the Department of Medicine at Stanford University.

His first novel, Cutting for Stone, was published by Knopf in 2009 and was an international bestseller.

His first book, My Own Country, a memoir about AIDS in rural Tennessee, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and made into a movie. His second book, The Tennis Partner, was a New York Times notable book and a national bestseller. He has published extensively in the medical literature, and his writing has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes and elsewhere. 

Abraham Verghese is a strong advocate for the value of bedside skills and physical diagnosis, skills he sees as waning in an era of increasingly sophisticated medical technology, where the ‘i-patient' in the computer increasingly diverts physicians' attention from the real patient in the hospital bed. At Stanford, he was instrumental in development of the "The Stanford 25" initiative, which is designed to showcase and teach 25 fundamental physical exam skills and their diagnostic benefits to interns.

Dr. Verghese earned his medical degree at the University of Madras, did his residency at East Tennessee State University, College of Medicine, and completed his Fellowship in Infectious Disease at Boston University School of Medicine. He later earned a Master of Fine Arts degree at the Iowa Writers Workshop. He is a member of the National Academcy of Sciences, and in 2016 received the National Humanities Medal from President Obama.