My Own Country: AIDS, Compassion, and Dr. Verghese's Story

Introduction to the Memoir and Its Setting

This paper examines a case from My Own Country: A Doctor's Story by Abraham Verghese, discussing the effect AIDS had on the doctor and the effect his patients had on him. Verghese is an Indian-born physician who specializes in infectious diseases. He came to live and practice in Johnson City, Tennessee, in 1985, after the town's first AIDS case had already been treated. That year, the local hospital admitted another patient with AIDS, and before long an epidemic seemed to have struck the small community nestled in the Smoky Mountains. The memoir tells of Dr. Verghese's experiences with AIDS patients and how they transformed his own life.

The Case of Bobby Keller and Ed Maupin

The case of Bobby Keller and Ed Maupin is especially striking because of its broader implications. Ed and Bobby lived in a small town about sixty miles from Dr. Verghese's office in Johnson City. They sought care there precisely because they were afraid to be tested or treated in their own community. The two men had lived together for approximately ten years; both had been married before and had fathered children. Each had tried to deny his homosexuality through marriage, yet each found he could not sustain that pretense. They had practiced unsafe sex with multiple partners and had both contracted HIV.

Their sexual encounters sometimes took place out of town, and sometimes within their own small community, but they remained deeply ashamed and knew they would be ostracized if their illness became known. Bobby was intensely emotional — he cried hysterically upon learning of their diagnosis and begged the doctor to help his partner, who had been feeling exhausted for some time.

After Ed died, Bobby joined an AIDS support group and befriended Vickie McCray, the wife of another AIDS patient who herself carried the disease. By the end of the book, Bobby has also died, and most of the patients Dr. Verghese introduced have either died or entered the final stages of illness. Vickie McCray becomes a steadying presence for the group even after losing her husband. She decides to return to school to earn a nursing degree, and the doctor is deeply proud of her.

Stigma, Prejudice, and the Doctor's Isolation

Treating AIDS patients did not trouble Dr. Verghese personally — he was consistently professional and compassionate — but it did disturb many people around him, including colleagues in the medical profession and members of his own family. His father asked, "Do you wear gloves when you touch them?" (Verghese 168). The doctor himself confided: "What I didn't mention was how stressed I felt some days, how alienated I felt from other physicians, from friends, and even from my wife. By God, if what I was doing was noble, why did it feel like something… something shameful?" (Verghese 168).

Small-town prejudice runs throughout the memoir — from nurses who seemed content to let AIDS patients die, to family members who could not cope with the disease. That may be the most disheartening dimension of the book: so many people, blinded by their prejudices, could not see past them to the real human beings who were dying. The stigma surrounding AIDS in this era isolated not only patients but also the physicians who cared for them.

Conclusion: What the Patients Left Behind

Clearly, the experience Dr. Verghese had with his patients changed his life forever. He vowed to find ways to help them live out their remaining time with as much quality and dignity as possible. Near the end of the book he writes: "No matter how long I practice medicine, no matter what happens with this retrovirus, I will not be able to forget these young men, the little towns they came from, and the cruel, cruel irony of what awaited them in the big city" (Verghese 403).

The doctor's experiences were heart-wrenching. He lost nearly all of his patients, and he had formed close relationships with many of them. He was present with them — touching, comforting, striving with genuine dedication to make their final days as bearable as possible. The case of Bobby and Ed was particularly affecting because Ed died so suddenly, early in the narrative before anyone was prepared, and Bobby channeled his grief into helping others until he too died. Bobby was a caring and resilient man, deeply wounded by watching his friends die around him. He helped care for the terminally ill Clyde and never lost his irreverent sense of humor throughout.

Ed and Bobby were, in the end, a representation of everyone in the book who died. They were simply two people who loved each other and wanted to spend their lives together. To some, their being gay was what defined them — but in the end, they were just two people who wanted to live, and who died regardless. My Own Country is a touching, emotional, and at times infuriating memoir. It deepens the reader's understanding not only of the AIDS epidemic in the United States, but more importantly, of the people it claimed — and of the dedicated men and women who treated them every day while searching for a cure.