In Abraham Verghese’s new novel, English surgeon Thomas Stone and Indian nurse Sister Mary Joseph Praise meet on a fever- and seasickness-plagued ship sailing from India to Africa. Later both find work at a mission hospital in Ethiopia. An excerpt:
Increasingly, since the publication of his textbook, Stone had taken to quoting from it, as if his own written word had greater legitimacy than his unpublished (and heretofore unspoken) thoughts. He’d written, “The doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient, but there are circumstances when he has no recourse…” He had gone on to chronicle the tale of his own ray amputation, how he’d performed a nerve block on his right elbow, and then, with Sister Mary Joseph Praise “helping,” he had made the incision into his flesh, his left hand doing some of the work while Sister Mary Joseph Praise stood in for his right. He realized as he watched her make the bone cuts that she could do much more than assist if she chose to. It was the anecdote of the amputation, together with picture in the frontispiece, his fingers—all nine of them—forming a steeple in front of his chin, which had made the book so successful. There were so many extant surgery texts that it was surprising how popular The Expedient Operator (or A Short Practice, as it was known in some countries) had become. For a tropical surgery book, most of its sales took place in nontropical countries. Perhaps it was its quirkiness, its biting tenor, and the often sharp and unintended humor. He drew only on his experience or his careful interpretation of the experience of others. Readers pictured him as a revolutionary, but one who operated on the poor instead of preaching land reform. Students wrote him adoring letters, and when his dutiful responses (penned by Sister Mary Joseph Praise) didn’t match the gushy, confessional tone of their letters, they pouted.
The illustrations in the textbook (all drawn and lettered by Sister Mary Joseph Praise) had a simple quality, as if done on a napkin; no attempt was made at getting proportion or perspective right, but they were models of clarity. The book was translated into Portuguese, Spanish, and French.
Daring operations performed in darkest Africa, that was how the publisher had described the book on the back cover. The reader, knowing nothing about the “dark continent,” filled in the blanks, pictured Stone in a tent, a kerosene lamp held up by a Hottentot providing the only light, elephants stampeding outside while the good doctor recited Cicero and excised a part of himself as blithely as if he were cutting for stone on the body of another. What neither the reader nor Stone would accept was that his self-amputation was as much an act of conceit as it was an act of heroism.
Excerpted from Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese. Copyright © 2009 by Abraham Verghese. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
