A physician and best-selling author with a reputation for his focus on healing in an era where technology often overwhelms the human side of medicine made his debut at Calcutta’s annual tryst with books and ideas earlier this week.

Abraham Verghese, a professor at the School of Medicine at Stanford University, was in conversation with Sandip Roy, podcaster and columnist based in Calcutta, on January 22, Day 2 of the Coal India Kolkata Literary Meet 2025, in association with The Telegraph.

The session was titled Maps and Stethoscopes.

Verghese’s early years as an orderly, his care of terminal AIDS patients in rural America in Tennessee and the insights he gained from the relationships he formed and the suffering he witnessed led to his first book, My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story, that came out in 1994. It was chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by TIME magazine and later filmed as My Own Country directed by Mira Nair.

Verghese’s latest book, the bestselling Covenant of Water, which came out in 2023, is set in Kerala, where he traces his roots.

On Wednesday, on the lawns of the Agri-Horticultural Society of India in Alipore, Verghese said diseases had metaphors and in the case of HIV, the metaphor was stronger than the disease itself.

“There is something that is as old as history; every illness has a metaphor.... For example, tuberculosis, believe it or not, used to be seen as a romantic disease. One was suffering from an excess of passion. People like (John) Keats (the English poet) died of tuberculosis whereas cancer was seen, again unfairly, as a weakness of the soul.

“In my early career, I had never come across a disease like the one caused by HIV, where the metaphor was shame and secrecy. In my mind, the metaphor was more powerful than the disease,” said Verghese, who was awarded the National Humanities Medal, presented by President Barack Obama, in 2015.

“I had quite a few patients. I had the misfortune to tell them they had HIV and to have them come back the next day for counselling. Two of them, the very night they got the news, ended their own lives. I often felt that they had not been killed by the disease but they had been killed by the metaphor, by what it meant to have the disease,” he said.

Roy, the host, asked what drew Verghese to write about lepers and HIV-affected people. “What drew you to writing about them and what do you think they tell us about our human condition?”

Verghese replied: “They always tell writers that you should write what you know. This is my bread and butter. I am an infectious disease specialist and spent a lot of time with HIV. When I was a medical student in Chennai, I saw a lot of leprosy.... These are indelible diseases.

When I became a medical student and a physician, I began to see humanity, especially among lepers. Behind that scarred, somewhat scary exterior, is a human being in great distress. The biggest part of the distress is not so much the disease but society’s rejection of them.”

Roy said Verghese grapples with, both as a writer and as a person, the “tension between the physician’s power to cure and power to heal”.

Verghese said in his formative years as a physician, he, like many of his peers, was a prisoner of a “conceit of cure”, a sense that “we could fix anything”.

“That was until we were all, a generation of us, humbled by the disease (HIV).... We discovered that we could not cure it. But even when we could not cure, we discovered that there was something profound that you could do. Even when you can’t cure, you can heal,” he said.