Abraham Verghese had given his living room over to writing. When I photographed him at his Palo Alto home in August 2023, a large bay window filled the room with natural light. His desk faced outward, crowded with books and artifacts. Two jointed wooden mannequins sat on the desk, and behind him stood a whiteboard covered with story ideas. The Covenant of Water had been published that spring. I was glad to spend an afternoon in the room where he wrote.
We talked about medicine and literature, two pursuits that seemed entirely at home together at that desk. Abraham has spent much of his life attending to what people try to tell him, including what they cannot easily put into words. As a physician, he has argued that the living person in a hospital bed can become strangely invisible behind the wall of data gathered about them.
A digital chart may contain an extraordinary amount of detail. Scans reveal structures a doctor could never examine by touch. Yet someone still has to examine the patient, ask where it hurts, and notice what has changed. Abraham has spent decades teaching the skills that make those encounters useful, and explaining the trust they can establish.
At Stanford, he helped develop Stanford Medicine 25, a program devoted to bedside examination. Recognizing a finding in a textbook is different from knowing how to elicit it reliably. An uneven gait or an abnormal reflex can direct the next question, test, or treatment. The physical examination also conveys something that cannot be entered in a chart: the physician is paying attention to the person who has come for help.
As an infectious disease specialist in Tennessee during the early AIDS epidemic, Abraham cared for people facing an illness compounded by fear and rejection. The treatments that would later transform HIV care were still years away. He remained involved in his patients’ lives as their illnesses progressed. Those encounters became My Own Country, his 1994 memoir, an account of people and families in a town learning to confront a disease many had imagined belonged elsewhere.
Fiction gave him another way to explore illness within the course of a life. Cutting for Stone follows twin brothers born in Ethiopia, where Abraham was born and raised. In The Covenant of Water, three generations of a family in Kerala live with a recurring tragedy: someone in each generation dies by drowning. Across decades, changes in medical understanding give the family’s history new meaning.
His novels give people time to be known. Illness enters lives already crowded with responsibilities and attachments. A diagnosis may explain what is happening in a body while leaving much of that life unexplained.
I enjoyed seeing Abraham in the creative clutter of his home, with daylight across his desk and ideas still waiting on the board behind him. The books had reached people around the world, but here the work remained tangible: a place to sit, pages to write, a story still taking shape. Our conversation gave me another reason to return to his books, and to take my time with the people in them.
