My Own Country: A Doctor's Story, in detail
My Own Country is Abraham Verghese's account of his years as an infectious disease specialist in Johnson City, Tennessee, during the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Verghese, who was born in Ethiopia to Indian parents and trained in medicine in India before emigrating to the United States, arrived in Appalachia as an outsider and found himself at the center of an epidemic that was, in the mid-1980s, presumed to belong to cities. What he found instead was a steady stream of gay men who had left rural Tennessee for New York, San Francisco, and Atlanta — and who, when they became sick, came home to die.
The book is a portrait of two communities discovering each other under the worst possible circumstances. The gay men returning to Johnson City had mostly kept their lives secret from their families; the families, often deeply religious and culturally conservative, had to confront both their child's illness and their child's life simultaneously. Verghese treats these encounters with great care. He is neither a moralist nor a sentimentalist. He records what happened in the exam room, the hospital, the home, with the kind of attention that comes from a doctor who understood that treating AIDS at that moment meant treating the whole human context of illness.
Verghese's own identity runs through the book as a secondary current. He is an immigrant, an outsider, and someone who understands from personal experience what it means to be between worlds. That positioning gives him unusual access — his patients trusted him partly because he himself didn't fully belong to either the rural Tennessee world or the urban gay world they had left. The memoir is also a document of medicine at a particular crisis moment, before effective treatment existed and when the primary skill a doctor needed was the ability to accompany patients through dying.
My Own Country is a quieter book than its subject might suggest. Verghese is a measured, elegant writer. He does not overexplain. The accumulation of individual stories — patients, families, nurses, colleagues — builds a picture of a community under strain that is more affecting for being specific rather than representative.
The big ideas
- 1.
The AIDS epidemic in rural America was shaped by the pattern of gay men leaving small towns and returning home when they became ill, a dynamic that brought the epidemic to places assumed to be unaffected.
- 2.
Treating AIDS in the 1980s was almost entirely palliative — Verghese's role was accompaniment through dying rather than cure, which required a different kind of medical practice.
- 3.
Verghese's outsider identity as an immigrant and a person of color in Appalachia gave him unusual access to communities that might not have trusted a local doctor.
