An explanation

Since reading Cutting for Stone, as I said in the post below, I've not really understood the reference. Rachel who read the book too was also mystified and she was ambitious enough to do some research which I quote:

Human beings have known of bladder stones ("vesical calculi") for thousands of years, and have attempted to treat them for almost as long. The oldest bladder stone that has been found was discovered in Egypt around 1900, and it has been dated to 4900 BC. The earliest written records describing bladder stones date to before the time of Hippocrates (ca. 460-370 BC). However, lithotomy was a fairly common procedure in the past, and there were specialized lithotomists. The ancient Greek Hippocratic Oath includes the phrase: "I will not cut for stone, even for the patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners," a clear warning for physicians against the "cutting" of persons "laboring under the stone"; an act that was better left to surgeons (who were distinct from physicians at that time in history). Operations to remove bladder stones via the perineum, like other surgery before the invention of anesthesia, were intensely painful for the patient.[1]

In short, it is surgeons who do the really hard work of "cutting for stone." Since the pivotal characters in the novel are all surgeons of one type or another and many difficult [and blood] surgeries are described in the book, and the surgeons happen to be very skilled, they are the ones who must "cut for stone." A pun is involved as well, as Stone is the last name of the protagonist and his twin brother and, of course, their father.

I am appropriately humbled because I was too lazy to do the research myself -- in our Google-era such research is so easy not to do it is indeed lazy. In an earlier time ignorance about these "minor" but curious things might be excusable but it no longer is. i think I've just learned a les

Cutting for Stone, Abraham Veghese

"I Like Big and Long," is the teasing title of an essay I wrote a month ago about my preference for expansive novels with big themes. Cutting for Stone, Abraham Veghese,M.D.'s first novel fits that description very well and I enjoyed the long read very much especially because I like novels set in exotic countries I've never visited, in thie case mostly Ethiopia. I also enjoy "true" medical desxsriptions, in this case mostly sugery. I have read some of Dr. Verghese's essays in the NY Times Science Section and always found hin a very patient-centric doctor. This, his first novel, is a medical centric story, there are four M.D.s who are all as brilliant and dedicated and caring as we all wish our doctors were [and usually aren't]. I was a little bothered because they were so heroic and yet it's like reading about knights on a crusade, they need to be truly good.

The story gives us lots of drama, the frision of identical twins who have very different personalities, and a goodly dollop of the politics of Ethiopia. Those are all enough for me as nothing is gauche or sentimental. Yes, all the dangling ends get tied up neatly at the end but that is a writer's impulse I understand very well. it's summer and this is not a sterotypical "Summer" or "beach" novel -- it's much better than that. Verghese is a multi-talented man, a distinguished career in medicine has somehow given him enough time to write essays, a couple of nonfiction books and this quite long novel. I hope he'll write more. I hope the titles make more sense -- I can't seem to wrap my head around the title. A minor problems.