Last night I did something more interesting than eat pastaand watch PBS reruns. The Seattle Arts and Lectures is a series of live readings and talks by writers and other literary personalities. One of the reasons I love Seattle is that an author's lecture can nearly fill Benaroya Hall on a dark and wet Wednesday night. I don't have season tickets, but go to lectures occasionally with an old and dear friend, which makes the evening even more special. Not to mention a nice dinner before at the Wild Ginger!
Dr. Abraham Verghese (pictured here) spoke last night, and I was looking forward to hearing him ever since I read his first novel, "Cutting for Stone". We often say someone is a "remarkable person," but it would be hard to summarize this man's gifts and great humanity. He spoke simply and brilliantly on topics ranging from fiction writing to the rituals of healing, and the dehumanization of medical care in wealthy western countries. Having practiced medicine in Ethiopia and India, he spoke about how technology and the economics of our medical system are contrary to the most important traditions of doctoring: common sense diagnosis, listening to patients, and the healing effect of simple hand's on attention. And as for medical school, he mentioned the "gateway to medicine in America is too narrow." The education system has not changed in decades, and now we need broader and more varied gifts and talents.
We tend to think of physicians as left-brained: logical, rational, analytical, objective. Yet here is a man who quotes T.S. Eliot, defends fiction reading and writing, and along with teaching and practicing medicine at Stanford, in his "spare time" writes beautiful novels in his second language. And it truly spoke to me when he said, "we write to understand how we feel."
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