Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [281]
The line “I owe you the sight of morning” is by W. S. Merwin from the poem “To the Surgeon Kevin Lin,” originally published in The New Yorker. A limited-edition print of this poem prepared by Caro lee Campbell of Ninja Press and signed by William Merwin hangs in my office. I owe a great debt to physician, writer, and friend Ethan Canin for first inviting me to the Sun Valley Writers Festival and thereby introducing me to Reva Tooley and the remarkable people who gather there.
The line “her nose was sharp as a pen” is from Henry V, Part II and relates to my belief that it represents Shakespeare's astute clinical observation, which I described in “The Typhoid State Revisited,” in The American Journal of Medicine (79:370; 1985).
My own impressions of Aden and my memories of sitting in khat sessions were aided by the most vivid descriptions in Eric Hansen's wonderful book Motoring with Mohammed: Journeys to Yemen and the Red Sea and also Eating the Flowers of Paradise: One Man's Journey Through Ethiopia and Yemen by Kevin Rushby. The image of the woman with the charcoal brazier on her head and also the wheelbarrows transporting people come from Hansen's book.
The Italian occupation, the description of Aweyde, and many aspects of the Italian-Ethopian conflict, including the desire to win by any means—Qualsiasi mezzo—were informed by Paul Theroux's wonderful Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Capetown and many other sources.
“Squared her shoulders to the unloveliness” is a paraphrase of James Merrill's line in the poem “Charles on Fire”: “No one but squared / The shoulders of his unloveliness.”
Bliss Carnochan showed me an early edition of his Golden Legends: Images of Abyssinia, Samuel Johnson to Bob Marley and helped me see how Western ideas about Ethiopia were shaped.
I and countless Commonwealth medical students admired Bailey and Love's Short Practice of Surgery; Stone's imagined textbook is based on Bailey and Love, and the wombat and the appendix story is from there. As a student I was impressed with the photograph of Bailey and his nine fingers. Other than that, the character of Stone has no connection with Hamilton Bailey, who practiced only in England before retiring.
“A careful decision was needed so as not to blunder again. It was often the second mistake that came in the haste to correct the first mistake that did the patient in” and “A rich man's faults are covered with money, but a surgeon's faults are covered with earth” are both from Aphorisms and Quotations for the Surgeon by Moshe Schein. For these and many other surgical notions, I owe Moshe, maverick surgeon, brilliant teacher, author of several wonderful surgical textbooks, essayist, and friend. He not only read early drafts but also introduced me to the community of surgeons on SURGINET I delighted in, learned from, and borrowed ideas from their musings, particularly the vasectomy details, which made for a series of memorable exchanges. Karen Kwong shared with me her experiences (and those of her husband, Marty) as a trauma surgeon, and she was a careful reader of the manuscript both early and at the end. Her long, thoughtful e-mails were precious, and I cannot express to her sufficiently my gratitude and admiration. Thanks also to Ed Salztein, Jack Peacock, Stuart Levitz, and Franz Theard. I met Thomas Starzl when I was a Chief Resident in Tennessee and have since renewed the acquaintance. He is truly a surgeon's surgeon, and his pioneering work establishing the field of liver transplantation is no fiction; I refer to him in the book in tribute. Thomas Stone is his fictional contemporary. Francisco Cigarroa, president of the University of Texas Health Science Center, San Antonio, was kind enough to let me watch as he performed a liver transplant on a child. The remarkable group