What other important differences does Cutting for Stone reveal about the way illness is viewed and treated in Ethiopia and in the United States?
To what extent are these differences reflected in the split between poor hospitals, like the one in the Bronx where Marion works, and rich hospitals like the one in Boston where his father works? In the novel, Thomas Stone asks, "What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear? Have your experiences with doctors and hospitals held this to be true?
Why or why not? What does Cutting for Stone tell us about the roles of compassion, faith, and hope in medicine? There are a number of dramatic scenes on operating tables in Cutting for Stone : the twins' births, Thomas Stone amputating his own finger, Ghosh untwisting Colonel Mebratu's volvulus, the liver transplant, etc. How does Verghese use medical detail to create tension and surprise? What do his depictions of dramatic surgeries share with film and television hospital dramas—and yet how are they different?
Marion suffers a series of painful betrayals—by his father, by Shiva, and by Genet. To what degree is he able, by the end of the novel, to forgive them?
To what extent does the story of Thomas Stone's childhood soften Marion's judgment of him? How does Thomas's suffering as a child, the illness of his parents, and his own illness help to explain why he abandons Shiva and Marion at their birth? How should Thomas finally be judged?
In what important ways does Marion come to resemble his father, although he grows up without him? How does Marion grow and change over the course of the novel? A passionate, unique love affair sets Cutting for Stone in motion, and yet this romance remains a mystery—even to the key players—until the very conclusion of the novel. What do you think Verghese is trying to say about the nature of love and loss?
Addis Ababa is at once a cosmopolitan city thrumming with life and the center of a dictatorship rife with conflict. How do the influences of Ethiopia's various rulers—including Italyand Emperor Selassie—reveal themselves in day-to-day life?
How does growing up there affect Marion's and Shiva's worldviews? As Ghosh nears death, Marion comments that the man who raised him had no worries or regrets, that "there was no restitution he needed to make, no moment he failed to seize" p.
What is the key to Ghosh's contentment? What makes him such a good father, doctor, and teacher? What wisdom does he impart to Marion? Although it's also a play on the surname of the characters, the title Cutting for Stone comes from a line in the Hippocratic Oath: "I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.
Almost all of the characters in Cutting for Stone are living in some sort of exile, self-imposed or forced, from their home country—Hema and Ghosh from India, Marion from Ethiopia, Thomas from India and then Ethiopia.
Verghese is of Indian descent but was born and raised in Ethiopia, went to medical school in India, and has lived and worked in the United States for many years. What do you think this novel says about exile and the immigrant experience? How does exile change these characters, and what do they find themselves missing the most about home?
Questions issued by publisher. Site by BOOM. Search Go. Author Bio. Book Reviews. Discussion Questions. The story spans five decades and three continents. As a narrator Marion reveals himself through his relationships with those who touch his life.
These characters are rich, and his relationships with them are transformative. He is sensitive to the events that shape his life and the lives of those around him without soliciting pity from his reader but rather empathy.
One of the most compelling scenes in the story is the birth of Marion and Shiva. Through the eventful labor in Operating Theater 3 at Missing Hospital in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, we meet new characters and learn more about those we already know—and how they react when they are pushed to the limits of their moral edges.
Thomas Stone an Englishman of nomadic surgical disposition ; and those who have a role in bringing the twins into the world: Matron Hirst, Hema, Ghosh, and the Probationer. This is the seminal scene of Cutting for Stone and sets one up for a beautifully crafted story told by a master craftsman.
ShivaMarion, as Marion refers to himself and his brother, are in many ways inseparable, but their lives take very different paths. Marion is inspired by Ghosh to become a surgeon though Ghosh did not start out as a surgeon himself ; and Shiva inspires Hema, the obstetrician who brought them into the world—and the only mother they know—to try a new procedure at Missing Hospital to correct fistula in women, henceforth becoming the world authority on fistula surgery without being a surgeon himself.
Matron's right-hand man is Gebrew , a local priest who doubles as hospital watchman. He doesn't do much in the novel except exemplify the fact that Christianity has deep roots in Ethiopia, and he often carries out Matron's bidding. Almaz , too, is around mostly as a servant; we don't know much about her inner life. Rosina is Ghosh and Hema's maid. She's also Genet's mother, and while Genet is ready to embrace new ideals, Rosina clings tightly to old traditions.
She cuts her daughter's face in a tribal ritual, and she also has Genet circumcised after she loses her virginity. When the procedure almost kills her daughter, Rosina kills herself. He has a family elsewhere, but whenever Mebratu visits Ghosh to play cards, he visits Rosina and has a little family on the side with them. How does exile change these characters, and what do they find themselves missing the most about home?
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Verghese is something of a magician as a novelist. Introduction An epic novel that spans continents and generations, Cutting for Stone is an unforgettable story of love and betrayal, compassion and redemption, exile and home that unfolds across five decades in India, Ethiopia, and America. Mary and Thomas meet on a boat out of Madras in ; she follows him to Ethiopia and to Missing, where they work side by side for seven years as nurse and doctor.
After Mary dies while giving birth to the twins—a harrowing, traumatic scene on the operating table—Thomas vanishes, and Marion and Shiva grow up with only a dim sense of who he was, and with a deep hostility toward him for what they see as an act of betrayal and cowardice. The twins are raised by Hema and Ghosh, two Indian doctors who also work at Missing, and who shower Marion and Shiva with love and nurture their interest in medicine—part of the deep, almost preternatural connection the brothers share.
They are so close that Marion, as a boy, thinks of them as a single entity: ShivaMarion. Addis Ababa is a colorful, cosmopolitan city: the Italians have left behind cappuccino machines, Campari umbrellas, and a vibrant expat community.
Yet it is not politics but love that tears the brothers apart: Shiva sleeps with Genet—the daughter of their housekeeper and the girl Marion has always loved. This second betrayal, now by the two people this sensitive young man loves most, sends Marion into a deep depression.
Marion interns at a hospital in the Bronx, an underfunded, chaotic place where the patients are nearly as poor and desperate as those he had seen at Missing. It is here that Marion comes to maturity as a doctor and as a man.
It is here, too, that he meets his father and takes his first steps toward reconciling with him. But when the past catches up to Marion—nearly destroying him—he must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him. The surprising, stunning denouement both arises from and reenacts the major themes of Cutting for Stone : love and betrayal, forgiveness and self-sacrifice, and the inextricable union of life and death.
In Cutting for Stone , renowned physician Abraham Verghese has given us a remarkable reading experience that explores the lives of a memorable cast of characters, many of them doctors; the insight the novel offers into the world of medicine, along with its wealth of precise detail about how doctors work, is unparalleled in American fiction.
Verghese is so attuned to the movements of the heart and of the mind, so adept at dramatizing the great themes of human existence, and he has filled this world with such richly drawn, fascinating characters, that Cutting for Stone becomes one of those rare books one wishes would never end, an alternate reality that both rivals and illuminates the real world readers must return to when the book is closed.
Questions and Topics for Discussion 1. He lives in Palo Alto, California. Learn More About Cutting for Stone print.
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