Have you ever read Gone With the Wind? That’s my Civil War novel – I refer to it in my head when people are discussing this period in United States history (with regard to culture, not really the actual war). This is perhaps a dangerous thing to do because, as a historical novel, Gone with the Wind is FICTION, but it works for me. Cutting for Stone is set during a revolutionary time in (fairly recent – 1950s-1970s) Ethiopian history, which I don’t know anything about, and I should probably verify historical facts before I make this my in-brain reference book for Ethiopia circa 1970.

This post covers Part 3, pages 221-457, which contains the “money” passage of the book (I don’t really consider this a spoiler, but you might):

“The key to your happiness is to own your slippers, own who you are, own how you look, own your family, own the talents you have, and own the ones you don’t. If you keep saying your slippers aren’t yours, then you’ll die searching, you’ll die bitter, always feeling you were promised more. italic – Not only our actions, but also our omissions, become our destiny.”

I have been thinking about this since I read it – there is a great deal of praying in this book, but the lesson is that we are ultimately responsible for ourselves. When we are dealt a bad hand, then we are responsible for how we respond. This reminded me of “karma” – the complex idea that our lives are shaped by past and present action. I hear people mentioning “karma” all the time, particularly when they have been wronged (you’ve heard the phrase “karma’s a b***h” – maybe you have even said it). Unfortunately, from what I understand of karma (and I don’t know all that much about Buddhist tradition), it doesn’t work this way – if you ask for something bad to happen to someone as punishment for wronging you (or even if you only think it), you are actually bringing worse calamity down on yourself – in other words, karma will not “avenge” you. We are ultimately responsible only for our own actions.

This section talks more about Marion Sims: “His first patients were Anarcha, Betsy, and Lucy, three slave women who had been cast out by their families and their owners because of this condition. Sims operated on them–willing subjects we are told–in an attempt to cure the fistula. Ether had just been discovered but wasn’t in widespread use, so his patients were wide awake….He kept trying. He operated on Anarcha some thirty times. He learned from each failure, modified his technique until he ultimately got it right.”

I looked him up – it turns out that that Marion Sims is a controversial figure in gynecological medicine, but only fairly recently. There is a statue of him in New York, and some tools and procedures are named after him, because he is also considered a pioneer in female medicine. I wonder why Abraham Verghese depicted him so positively in this book – surely he knows about the controversy, or he wouldn’t have implied that the slave women were not necessarily willing subjects. It is particularly disturbing that Verghese implies that the only reason the women were not given ether is because it “wasn’t in widespread use” instead of acknowledging Sims’ racist beliefs. Honestly, I would like this book better had the author at least been neutral rather than so positive when discussing Sims.

Okay, I’ll end with a pretty passage from this section: “He had so many ways of climbing into the tree house in his head, escaping the madness below, and pulling the ladder up behind him; I was envious.” What do you do when things are out of control? Are you calm? Do you have a “tree house in [your] head”? I’m not envious of this character – I would not want to pull the ladder up behind me until my people were safely in the tree house with me – I’m not much for solitude. Maybe that’s why I like reading so much – even when I’m alone I’m not alone.

Other posts about Cutting for Stone:

Post 1: Cutting for Stone, by Abraham Verghese
Post 2: Coffee, Milk, and Bringing God to the Natives
Post 3: Karma, Brain Library, Villains, and Solitude
Post 4: Poor Urban Hospitals