Cutting for Stone - Abraham Verghese [282]
“Birth, and copulation, and death / That's all the facts when you come to brass tacks: I've been born, and once is enough” is a partial quote form T. S. Eliot's Sweeney Agonistes.
“Indeed to think of life as tragic is a posture of delusion, for life is uniformly worse than tragic” is a line from Heinrich Zimmer's The King and the Corpse, edited by Joseph Campbell, as is “Not only our actions but also our omissions become our destiny.”
“They saw in the plague a sure and God-sent means of winning eternal life” is from Camus’ The Plague.
I am greatly indebted to the late Ryszard Kapuscinski's take on a city and a country which I thought I knew well. Details of the Emperor's court, the palace, the funding of the health departments, the Amhara character, the motorcycle escort, the Minister of the Pen, and the palace intrigues were things most residents knew about and had in some cases seen firsthand, but Kapuscinski's particular talent was, as an outsider, making those things more visible to us, which he did in his extraordinary book The Emperor.
“The crookedness of the serpent is still straight enough to slide through the snake hole” is paraphrased from one of the Bhakti poems in Speaking of Siva, edited by the late, great A. K. Ramanujam.
For information about the Carmelites I thank Fred de Sam Lazaro and Eliam Rao and the incomparable Sister Maude. There is no convent of Carmelites to my knowledge in Egmore.
The details of the the Rock of East Africa, AFRS Asmara, are from http://www.kagnewstation.com/.
For the scenes of the escape from Asmara, I thank Naynesh Kamani, who was my senior in medical school and who made that heroic walk; he read the manuscript and had many corrections and suggestions. I was greatly influenced by Thomas Kennealy's wonderful novel To Asmara, with its observations about the Eritrean guerrilla camps which Kennealy appeared to have visited; he remains a champion of the Eritrean people. I should state that my affection is equal for both Ethiopia and Eritrea, and I have dear friends in both places.
“As if I had given him the greatest gift a man could ever give another” is a paraphrase of a line in Raymond Carver's “What the Doctor Said,” from New Path to the Waterfall.
For the scenes at the tuberculosis sanatorium, I am indebted to Jean Mason's “The Discourse of Disease: Patient Writing at the ‘University of Tuberculosis,’ “ which I was fortunate to hear at the Psychoanalysis and Narrative Medicine Conference, University of Florida, Gainesville, in 2002.
“May no English nobleman venture out of this world without a Scottish Physician, as I am sure there are none who venture in” was said to be a toast used by William Hunter, M.D., the elder of the Hunter brothers. I have paraphrased this as a toast that B. C. Gandhi uses.
“Call no man happy until he dies” is what the Athenian Solon tells Croesus, the wealthy king of Lydia, according to Herodotus. These are words that Sir William Osler quoted on hearing the news of his beloved son Revere's death at Flanders. The imagined nursing textbook that describes Sound Nursing Sense is a recasting of one of Osler's aphorisms.
For the information on psychosomatic ailments among Ethiopians, I am grateful to my friend Rick Hodes, M.D., internist, writer, and mensch. His life in Ethiopia is a story of its own. Thanks to Thomas “Appu” Oommen for his incredible recollections of his time in Addis as a schoolboy and later as a journalist, and of the period of the coup. An e-mail Appu shared with me from Yohannes Kifle gave me great insight into Kerchele. My parents, George and Mariam Verghese, shared their memories, and my mother made extensive notes just for my use. To them I have dedicated this book.
In the course of writing this novel over several years, I consulted many