Fiction and Medicine

Abraham Verghese is Professor and Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine at the School of Medicine at Stanford University. He is also a best-selling author and a physician whose focus on healing and empathy stands out in an era when technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine. His books include the celebrated novel Cutting for Stone and two works of nonfiction, My Own Country and The Tennis Partner. Verghese writes about the body and medicine in a way that is all his own, and in his newest novel, The Covenant of Water, he tells much of the story of twentieth-century India through a single family.

In conversation with Michael Krasny