To be discussed April 7, 2010 at 6:30 p.m.
This story told by Marion Stone begins even before Marion and his twin brother, Shiva, are born in Addis Ababa’s Missing Hospital (a mispronunciation of “Mission Hospital”), with the illicit romance between their parents, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, a beautiful Indian nun, and Thomas Stone, a brash, brilliant British surgeon. Mary and Thomas meet on a boat out of Madras in 1947; she follows him to Ethiopia and to Missing, where they work side by side for seven years as nurse and doctor. After Mary dies while giving birth to the twins Thomas vanishes, and Marion and Shiva grow up with only a dim sense of who he was, and with a deep hostility toward him for what they see as an act of betrayal and cowardice.
The twins are raised by Hema and Ghosh, two Indian doctors who also work at Missing, and who shower Marion and Shiva with love and nurture their interest in medicine. Marion and Shiva come of age as Ethiopia hovers on the brink of revolution, and their lives become intertwined with the nation’s politics. Addis Ababa is a colorful, cosmopolitan city: the Italians have left behind cappuccino machines and Campari umbrellas. But they've also left a nation crippled by poverty, hunger, and authoritarian rule. Yet it is not politics but love that tears the brothers apart: Shiva sleeps with Genet --- the daughter of their housekeeper and the girl Marion has always loved. And when Genet joins a radical political group fighting for the independence of Eritrea, Marion’s connection to her forces him into exile: he sneaks out of Ethiopia and makes his way to America. Marion interns at a hospital in the Bronx where the patients are nearly as poor and desperate as those he had seen at Missing. It is here that Marion meets his father and takes his first steps toward reconciling with him. But when the past catches up to Marion he must entrust his life to the two men he thought he trusted least in the world: the father who abandoned him and the brother who betrayed him.
1. What does Cutting for Stone reveal about the emotional lives of doctors? Contrast the attitudes of Hema, Ghosh, Marion, Shiva, and Thomas Stone toward their work.
2. Marion observes that in Ethiopia, patients assume that all illnesses are fatal and that death is expected, but in America, news of having a fatal illness “always seems to come as a surprise, as if we take it for granted that we were immortal”. What other differences are revealed about the way illness is viewed and treated in Ethiopia and in the United States?
3. In the novel, Thomas Stone asks, “What treatment in an emergency is administered by ear?” The correct answer is “Words of comfort.” How does this moment encapsulate the book’s surprising take on medicine?
4. Marion suffers a series of painful betrayals --- by his father, by Shiva, and by Genet. To what degree is he able, by the end of the novel, to forgive them?
5. In what important ways does Marion come to resemble his father, although he grows up without him? How does Marion grow and change over the course of the novel?
6. A passionate, unique love affair sets Cutting for Stone in motion, and yet this romance remains a mystery --- even to the key players --- until the very conclusion of the novel.
7. The title Cutting for Stone comes from a line in the Hippocratic Oath: “I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art.” Verghese has said that this line comes from ancient times, when bladder stones were epidemic and painful: “There were itinerant stone cutters who could cut into either the bladder or the perineum and get the stone out, but because they cleaned the knife by wiping it on their blood-stiffened surgical aprons, patients usually died of infection the next day.” How does this line resonate for the doctors in the novel?
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