Review
As a bookseller, I live for novels like
Cutting for Stone - big, fat,
beautiful novels as beguiling and enchanting as babies, as wise and as generous
as old sages. They are the bread-and-butter novels I can't wait to sell, the
books people talk about all year long, the books they buy for their sisters and
fathers, the book they press into the hands of friends with insistent, almost
violent exhortations.
Read this. You will love it. You HAVE to read this
book. I talk about these books in the plural, as if there are scores of
them, but while their iconic status is great, their numbers are few. They don't
come along every season, or even every year, but I wait for them, hoping every
third book I read will be the one, that one single book that makes my heart leap
every time I know someone else is going to get to read it, too. And so, let me
be the first,...
Beyond the Book
The Hippocratic Oath
The title,
Cutting for Stone, refers to a line in the Hippocratic Oath,
and to the last name of the three main characters, all of them surgeons. As
Abraham Verghese quotes it, the line from the Oath reads "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." While this
line refers specifically to surgery for bladder stones (which were quite
prevalent in the 4th century BC), it's also a directive against surgery of all
kinds. Ancient Greek physicians did not practice surgery, instead referring
their patients to trained surgeons. Surgery was then considered a secondary
skill, and surgeons were not trained in theoretical...
