A physician who advocates for the power of human touch over technology will deliver Harvard’s commencement speech

Doctors interact with patients, in many cases, when they are feeling their worst – so, how they talk to those patients during such a vulnerable time matters. That’s the philosophy of Abraham Verghese, the bestselling author, Stanford professor, and infectious disease doctor who will address students at Harvard University’s 374th Commencement this week. Verghese will be the first physician to give Harvard’s commencement speech since 1996, according to the school’s student-run newspaper, The Harvard Crimson. That year, Harold E. Varmus, a Nobel Prize-winning scientist and former director of the National Institutes of Health, told graduates that supporting science was a shared human responsibility. “He has pursued excellence across disciplines with an intensity surpassed only by his humanity, which shines brilliantly through his works of both fiction and nonfiction, as well as his work as a clinician and teacher,” said Harvard President Alan M. Garber about Verghese in the university’s commencement announcement. In previous years, graduates have heard from many accomplished speakers: Nobel Prize-winning journalist Maria Ressa, Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks, former German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Academy Award-winning director Steven Spielberg and media mogul Oprah Winfrey. While the 69-year-old may not be a household name, Verghese is a prominent physician. His journey has taken him across the United States, healing patients through medicine and reaching people through literature, including his 2023 novel “The Covenant of Water.” Verghese declined to be interviewed for this story, but wrote on social media he was “deeply honored” to have been invited to Harvard by Garber, who was previously one of his colleagues at the Stanford School of Medicine. Harvard’s invitation to Verghese, comes at a time of significant uncertainty at the Ivy League school amid its ongoing clashes with the Trump administration over academic freedom, federal funding, campus oversight and most recently, a ban on the enrollment of international students. The power of a physical exam For many years, Verghese has advocated for strengthening the physician-patient connection and bedside skills. He joined the Stanford School of Medicine in 2007 as a professor and is currently, vice chair for the Theory & Practice of Medicine program. He also founded an interdisciplinary center at Stanford focused on the human experience in medicine and Stanford Medicine 25, an initiative designed to foster bedside exam skills for professionals. For Verghese, the most important innovation in medicine is “the power of the human hand to touch, to comfort, to diagnose, and to bring about treatment,” according to his 2011 TED Talk in Edinburgh, Scotland. Technology is impacting the interactions between patients and doctors because hospital rounds often center around data and images on a computer, far away from the actual patient, Verghese said during the TED Talk. “The ritual of one individual coming to another and telling them things that they would not tell their preacher or rabbi, and then, incredibly, on top of that, disrobing and allowing touch, I would submit to you that that is a ritual of exceeding importance,” Verghese said. “And if you short change that ritual by not undressing the patient, by listening with your stethoscope on top of the nightgown, by not doing a complete exam, you have bypassed on the opportunity to seal the patient-physician relationship.” Through Presence, an interdisciplinary center at Stanford, and Stanford Medicine 25, Verghese hopes to educate future medical professionals on bedside medicine, harnessing technology for the human experience as well as studying and advocating for the patient-physician relationship. Pursuing medicine in 3 continents Verghese has drawn from his personal experiences in three continents to fuel the type of educator and writer he has become today. He was born in Ethiopia’s capital city of Addis Ababa to expatriate Indian parents, who were both educators, and grew up there as the country was ruled by Emperor Haile Selassie. He started medical school in Ethiopia but fled the country when Selassie was toppled by a violent military dictatorship in the 1970s, Verghese wrote in The Guardian. Verghese reunited with his parents in New Jersey, where they had previously moved. There, he began working as a hospital orderly, which ultimately inspired him to return to his family’s homeland and become a physician. “Looking back, that was the best medical education I could have had, because I saw what happened to the patient in the 23 hours and 58 minutes the doctors were not in the room,” Verghese shared in an interview with a medical journal about his time as an orderly. Once he graduated from medical school in India, Verghese returned to the US and completed his residency at a hospital in Johnson City, Tennessee, followed by a fellowship in infectious diseases at the former Boston City Hospital in Massachusetts in the mid-1980s. During his time in rural east Tennessee, Verghese had a front row seat to the frontlines of the AIDS epidemic. That experience “humbled” him and changed the way he saw his practice, he said in an interview with the American Society of Hematology’s magazine, ASH Clinical News. “We learned what it meant to heal when we could not cure,” he told the magazine. “We realized how much our presence and caring mattered. A cure wasn’t within our reach, but we were making a profound difference by indicating to the patient that we would be there, that we were not running away.” And despite being able to do so little for his patients, who battled a disease with no treatment, he focused on providing them comfort and doing so filled him with purpose. From hospitals to literature After witnessing so much loss and health care workers’ burnout during the AIDS epidemic, Verghese has said becoming a writer became “a matter of self-preservation.” In 1990, the physician pressed pause on medicine to focus on his writing and attended the prestigious Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, according to his website. After earning his master’s degree in Iowa, Verghese moved to El Paso, Texas, where he was a professor of medicine and chief of the division of infectious diseases at Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center for 11 years. During that time, he would spend his evenings writing, he told Palo Alto Online. “Writing became my escape from the pressures of being an infectious disease clinician, ” he told ASH Clinical News. “Other people might have played golf or something, but for me it was writing,” he added. In his first novel “My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story,” Verghese pulled back the curtain on his own experiences and the meaningful, personal relationships he formed during the AIDS epidemic. The 1994 book was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and listed as one of Time magazine’s best books of the year. Verghese has written several other award-winning titles, including “The Tennis Partner,” “Cutting for Stone,” and most recently, “The Covenant of Water,” which is a New York Times bestseller, a Oprah’s Book Club pick and was named one of former president Barack Obama’s favorite books of 2023. “In my work as a writer, I have always tried to convey the notion that medicine is a uniquely human, person-to-person endeavor,” Verghese has said about his writing. “In my view, it is a ministry with a calling.” His family, notably his grandmothers, influenced “The Covenant of Water,” he said during a 2023 talk at the Stanford University School of Medicine. The novel is set in Kerala, south India, and follows three generations of a family looking for answers about a secret. “Both my grandmothers were, in their own way, quietly heroic women,” he said during the talk. “They had real life tragedies that they somehow weathered and they went on because of their faith.” Verghese has received many accolades for his work, including the 2014 Heinz Award – which highlights individuals making contributions to the arts, the economy and the environment – the 2015 National Humanities Medal, and the Guggenheim Fellowship in 2023. “Dr. Verghese’s widely acclaimed writings touch the heart and inform the soul, giving people of all walks of life a true understanding of what it is to heal the whole person - not just physically, but emotionally,” Teresa Heinz, chair of the Heinz Family Foundation, said in a news release at the time. While Harvard students will have to wait to hear his speech, Verghese previously addressed graduating students at the Stanford School of Medicine, where he implored them to let their innate intelligence guide them through the future.