When AIDS physician Dr. Abraham Verghese walked into the hospital room of a young man recovering from HIV-related pneumonia, he discovered a deadly crisis of spirit.
Norman Sanger, a hemophiliac who had contracted AIDS through blood transfusions, was terribly afraid of losing the dignity and courage which had bolstered him throughout a lifetime of pain.
Would AIDS make him sacrifice even this?
"He was looking at me as if I was supposed to reply," Dr. Verghese recounts. "As if, despite all his experience with medical people, for once he expected a pearl of wisdom to come from my mouth, something more than a platitude, something that would tangibly ease his mental anguish."
Instead, the doctor took Mr. Sanger's hand and held it tightly, transmitting the respect and strength that words, or drugs, could not provide. It was a moment of healing, one of many which Dr. Verghese has recounted in his critically acclaimed 1994 book "My Own Country."
Today Dr. Verghese will share some of the lessons he has learned from this devastating disease to the graduating seniors of Johns Hopkins University's School of Medicine.
Although recent classes have sought such nationally known commencementspeakers as former Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, this year's senior class chose a speaker who can tell them about the art of healing in a high-tech world. They chose a doctor who devotes much of his time to the kind of medicine that doesn't have billing codes: family visits, moral support and hand-holding.
"As medical students at Hopkins, we have dealt with people with AIDS. And what intrigued us was the way Dr. Verghese deals with the human side of things," says graduating senior Deborah Agnew who wrote the initial letter inviting him to speak.
"I'm not sure too many diseases have carried the metaphor that AIDS has carried," Dr. Verghese says. "I'm convinced it is two diseases: The first is the virus and the second, which is also lethal in its own way, is this huge metaphor of shame and secrecy and guilt.
"And, although we in big cities get lulled into thinking otherwise, the metaphor is still there."
It also shadows those who treat people with AIDS. Usually on the lower-paying levels of the medical specialties pyramid, these physicians must often defend such "depressing and hopeless" work to relatives and friends as well as to other doctors.
However, they have also become leaders in the movement to re-establish the importance of "the healing arts."
