Cutting for Stone

In my rather long life I have read scores of "medical" novels and stories -- creative fiction by doctors, about doctors. One or two helped to reinforce my schoolboy decision to study medicine myself. Several deserve to be called Literature. Now I'm reading Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese which unquestionably is literature. Even before I finished reading it, I elevated it confidently to the topmost pinnacle among literary works by and about doctors and matters medical. It's an astonishing book, an intricately plotted work set mainly in Addis Ababa then in New York about complex, believable characters, doctors who were well trained in Madras or Edinburgh, and found their way to Abyssinia when it had that name, left then returned after it had become Ethiopia when the next generation of doctors -- offspring of two characters who appear early then disappear from the scene, one of them dead, but leave indelible imprints on the narrator and his twin brother. There are graphic but not stomach-churning accounts of surgical and obstetric procedures, and vivid descriptions of everyday life in the exotic setting of Addis Ababa. It's colourful, gripping - unputdownable in places - tinged with magic realism, wise, and really beautifully written, Verghese has written short stories and articles for New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, etc, and two previous books, one of which I read, about his experience with HIV/AIDS in a small Tennesee city when he was young doctor, and saw how this disease exposed the local people's weaknesses and strengths. That book was fact, Cutting for Stone is fiction. He writes equally well in both modes, and his fiction is truly outstanding. He is now a professor of medicine and medical humanities at Stanford University school of medicine where he teaches students (I really envy those students!) and is able to pursue his career as a writer. This is definitely a book to read, to own and reread. I think it will become a classic.