Dr marc fortin biography of abraham

Early Years

Born in Addis Ababa in 1955, the second of three sons of Indian parents recruited by Emperor Haile Selassie to teach in Ethiopia, he grew up near the capital and began his medical training there. When the emperor was deposed, Verghese briefly joined his parents in the United States, working as an orderly, or nursing assistant, in a series of hospitals and nursing homes before completing his medical education in India at Madras Medical College.

His experiences of civil unrest and his time as a hospital orderly were to leave a significant mark on his life and work.

After graduation, he left India for a medical residency in the United States and, like many other foreign medical graduates, he found only the less popular hospitals and communities open to him, an experience he described in a 1997 New Yorker article, “The Cowpath to America.”

From Johnson City, Tennessee, where he was an internal medicine resident from 1980 to 1983, he moved to the Northeast for a fellow