In 1974, his education was interrupted by the civil unrest when emperor Haile Selassie was deposed and a Marxist military government took over.

[15] In his written work, he refers to that experience as deeply influential in confirming his desire to finish his medical training.

He worked for two years at Boston City Hospital, where he encountered the early signs of the urban HIV epidemic.

Although at the time he had no ambition to become a writer, he decided he wanted to tell the story of this tragedy, so he took a break from medicine to study writing.

[20] He is a hospitalist for Stanford Medical Center[1] and is the founder and director of the Presence program, which "champions the human experience in medicine.

[22] Later that year, The New Yorker magazine published his short story Lilacs about an AIDS patient who commits suicide.

He also ponders themes of displacement, diaspora, responses to foreignness and the many individuals and families affected by the AIDS epidemic.

The story deals with the ultimate death of his friend and explores the issue and prevalence of physician drug abuse.

[28] Cutting for Stone describes a period of dramatic political change in Ethiopia, a time of great loss for the author, who, as an expatriate, had to leave the country of his birth.

[36] His focus in San Antonio was developing medical humanities as a way to preserve doctors' innate empathy and sensitivity.

[38][3] "The Stanford 25", is an initiative developed to showcase and teach 25 fundamental physical exam skills and their diagnostic benefits to interns.

[39] In a 2023 interview, Verghese commented on how his writing skills help him pay more attention to patients' stories and ask more questions that can lead to better diagnoses.

As Robert Goodman writes: "Lamenting lost clinical skills is possibly one of our profession's oldest pastimes, dating back centuries, if not millennia...Should we spend more time at the bedside?

[41] He has also contributed to general-interest publications like The New Yorker, Texas Monthly, Atlantic, The New York Times, Granta, Forbes, and The Wall Street Journal, among others.