MEDICAL BULLETIN

Value friendships, speaker tells students

Abraham Verghese, M.D., talks with medical students at a reception in the Biomedical Research Building lobby after delivering the second annual Professionalism Lecture.

Physicians should be sources of support and encouragement for one another, Abraham Verghese, M.D., told Case Western Reserve University medical students gathered in Strosacker Auditorium Jan. 28 for the second annual Professionalism Lecture.

The noted physician and author, who directs the Center for Medical Humanities and Ethics and is the Marvin Forland Distinguished Professor of Medicine at the University of Texas Health Science Center in San Antonio, read from and talked about his 1998 book, The Tennis Partner: A Story of Friendship and Loss. In the book, Verghese addresses drug addiction and depression among health care professionals through the story of his relationship with David Smith, a former professional tennis player who was a medical student recovering from a cocaine habit when Dr. Verghese was a faculty member of Texas Tech El Paso.

“I hope that you will celebrate your friendships. I hope that you will see them as not just incidental to your life,” Dr. Verghese told students, adding that doctors should reach out to their fellow physicians as a way of unburdening themselves of stress.

The Professionalism Lecture, initiated in 2002-2003 by students through the student affairs committee of the Medical Alumni Association and the Committee of Student Representatives, is the only event simultaneously attended by all four medical school classes.

Dr. Verghese also is the author of My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story of a Town and Its People in the Age of AIDS, first published in 1994. During his visit to Cleveland, he also met separately with groups of faculty, house staff and students.