`My Own country` by Abraham Verghese

A Book Review on `My Own Country

One of the most insightful books ever written is the one by Abraham Verghese entitled My Own Country . This book is a semi-autobiographical in the sense that it is basically culled from the experiences of Abraham Verghese

The son of expatriate Indians who settled in Ethiopia , Abraham Verghese became an infectious disease specialist and settled in Tennessee , deep in the rural bible belt of America then he gradually became more and more involved in the care of people with AIDS . AIDS soon absorbed him

marriage and making him become more and more of an outsider to his peer group . The result is My Own Country : A Doctor 's Story of a Town and its People in the Age of AIDS

In My Own Country , Abraham Verghese , a young Indian doctor born and educated in Ethiopia , tells of the four years he spent in a Tennessee town as a specialist in infectious diseases . In late 1985 , Dr . Abraham Verghese , freshly licensed infectious-disease specialist , arrived in Johnson City , Tennessee , to begin his practice . The number of AIDS cases was beginning to rise in the urban centers of the East and West Coasts Dr . Verghese 's decision to leave Boston and return to rural Tennessee the site of his residency , meant leaving this new and troubling epidemic behind . Or so he thought

A few months before Dr . Verghese 's arrival in Johnson City , a young man who had left Tennessee years earlier for New York City arrived in the emergency room of the Johnson City Medical Center in extremis . He was successfully resuscitated but died three weeks later , after a bronchoscopy had confirmed the unthinkable : Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia . The patient had AIDS . When Dr . Verghese landed in Johnson City , hospital staffs were still debating what to do with the young man 's respirator . There were more than a few votes for burial or incineration

At that time , Johnson City 's inhabitants had heard about AIDS , but saw it purely as a big-city problem , and had no idea that the disease could invade their own community , a "typical " Southern town with little experience of illegal intravenous drug use or overt homosexuality . But as this book would eloquently demonstrate , no community is immune to AIDS , and the disease had already made its way to Johnson City , silently infecting a number of people

The simultaneous arrival of the young physician and the dread inner-city disease of gay men and drug users in the backwoods of the American South forms the story of My Own Country . This is rural America in the age of AIDS , and through the author 's eyes we see a region reluctantly come of age in the face of a changing reality . Even as the author 's practice grows from 1 to a dozen to 80 patients with AIDS , the townspeople go about their business , shopping at the Piggly Wiggly and drinking in the local taverns , utterly unconscious of the possibility that the person next to...