“Cutting for Stone” (post 1) by Abraham Verghese: Thomas Stone may have had multiple personality, for which twins and “possession” are metaphors

The first-person protagonist, Marion Stone, a twin, says he “was temperamentally better suited to a cognitive discipline, to an introspective field—internal medicine, or perhaps psychiatry…And so I became a surgeon” (1, p. 7).

The twins’ mother, a nurse, Sister Mary Joseph Praise, had been the main operating assistant of a surgeon, Dr. Thomas Stone, for seven years. “It was as if she had a bicameral mind, allowing one half to be a scrub nurse, shuttling instruments from the tray to his fingers, while the other side served as Stone’s third arm…(1, p. 34).

“Thomas Stone had a reputation at [the hospital] for being outwardly quiet but intense and even mysterious, though, as Dr. Ghosh [another doctor at the hospital], said, “When a man is a mystery to himself you can hardly call him mysterious” (1, p. 35).

“It was a well-kept secret that Stone had on three or four occasions…gone on a drunken binge. For a man who rarely drank, who loved his work , who found sleeping a distraction, who had to be reminded to go to bed, these episodes were mystifying. They came with the suddenness of influenza and the terror of possession…When they went looking for him the first time they found a babbling, disheveled white man, pacing in his quarters. During the episodes he did not sleep or eat…On the last occasion this creature had climbed the tree out its window and perched there for hours, muttering like a cross hen. A fall from that height would have cracked his skull…

“As abruptly as it started, in two days, no more than three, the spell would be over, and after a very long sleep Stone would be back at work as if nothing had happened, never making any reference to how he’d inconvenienced the hospital, the memory of it erased. No one ever brought it up to him because the other Stone, the one who rarely drank, would have been hurt and insulted by such inquiry or accusation. The other Stone was as productive as three full-time surgeons, and so these episodes were a small price to pay” (1, pp. 45-46).

Comment: Judging by Wikipedia (2), reviewers have not recognized that Thomas Stone’s out-of-character behavior, followed by memory gaps, as described at the beginning of this novel, is the classic pattern of multiple personality (a.k.a. “dissociative identity disorder”). Not to mention that twins and “possession” are metaphors for multiple personality.

1. Abraham Verghese. Cutting for Stone (a novel). New York, Vintage books, 2009.

2. Wikipedia. “Cutting for Stone.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cutting_for_Stone

3. Wikipedia. “Abraham Verghese.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abraham_Verghese