Two-time Olympic silver medalist Terrence Trammell and 2007 World Championship bronze medalist Kara Goucher lead a list of new athlete announcements from the organizers of the 2009 Reebok Boston Indoor Games to be held Saturday, February 7 at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center.

The Reebok Boston Indoor Games is the second event of USA Track & Field’s 2009 Indoor Visa Championship Series. The event will be televised on February 8 from 4:00-6:00 p.m. on ESPN (all times Eastern).

Trammell, who also has two World Indoor Championship gold medals, opened his 2009 season with an impressive win at the Millrose Games, narrowly missing Allen Johnson’s meet record in the 60 meter hurdles. Goucher, the 2007 World Outdoor Championship bronze medalist at 10,000m, also won at Millrose last week. Goucher will compete in the in the 3000 meters. Other Millrose winners slated to compete in Boston include 2008 Olympic silver medalist Jenn Stuczynski (pole vault) and 2008 Olympic gold medalist Steven Hooker (pole vault), 2008 U.S. Indoor champion Michael Rodgers (60m), Bianca Knight (60m) and Renny Quow (400m).

Organizers also announced that the pole vault will be contested on the same elevated vault runway which has been used at the Millrose Games since 1999. At Millrose, Steven Hooker broke the Madison Square Garden Record with his clearance of 6.01 meters/19 feet 8.5 inches and narrowly missed clearing the bar at Sergei Bubka’s World Record height of 6.15m/20-2, which has stood for sixteen years. Likewise, Jenn Stuczysnki, came very close to breaking the American Record in the women’s vault, with her winning height of 4.71m/15-5.5.

Tirunesh Dibaba, previously announced to compete in Boston, has withdrawn from the event citing a slow recovery from an injury.

Since the Reebok Boston Indoor Games began in 1996, more than 100 Olympic and World Championship medalists have competed in the event, which has also played host to 6 World Records and 29 National Records. The event has sold out for the last 5 years and is expected to do so in 2009.

The 14th-annual Reebok Boston Indoor Games begins at 5:30 p.m. on Feb. 7 at the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletic Center at Roxbury Community College, 1350 Tremont St. Information is now available on-line at www.BostonIndoorGames.com, and tickets are available on-line or by calling 1-877-TIX-TRAC. USATF welcomes you to pay with your VISA.

For more information on the 2009 Reebok Boston Indoor Games and the Indoor Visa Championship Series, visit www.usatf.org.

Abraham Verghese, a doctor, professor and writer, assigns…

Growing up in a middle-class Indian family in Ethiopia, Abraham Verghese says he had four career choices: “Doctor, lawyer, engineer … or failure.”

He didn’t have his elder brother’s dazzling aptitude for math, so engineering was out of the question. He loved literature, but it wasn’t an option. Instead, he declared his intention to become a doctor, a profession he has proudly practiced for 30 years.

Today, he is a professor at the Stanford University School of Medicine – and the author of two best-selling memoirs. One of them, “My Own Country,” a memoir of his medical residency in rural Tennessee at the start of the AIDS pandemic, was the basis of a 1997 film directed by Mira Nair.

That book, set in the time before the age of antiretroviral drugs, is a powerful treatise on the importance of “bedside medicine,” in which the body – not what he calls “the i-Patient” on a computer screen – is the primary concern. Bedside medicine teaches doctors to read the body for clues. As Verghese recalls, “By visiting patients in their home, by helping them come to terms with their illness, I could heal when I could not cure.”

He expands on the theme in his first novel, “Cutting for Stone,” published this month by Knopf and already receiving ecstatic reviews.

The novel tells the story of conjoined twins born in Ethiopia in charged circumstances – the issue of an Indian-born British surgeon and his nurse, a devout Carmelite nun.

Separated at birth but spiritually entwined, the twins become surgeons on different continents. Set against a backdrop of political and cultural dissonance, “Cutting for Stone” is an admixture, a marvel of intimacy and sweep. In it, the reader is taken under the skin – in the operating rooms and into the lives of a Dickensian cast of characters.

“I wanted to write a story about two continents,” Verghese said in a recent interview in his sunny office deep in the labyrinth of Stanford Medical Center.

“I was drawn to the idea of showing how we are very much the same in our aspirations for our children, in the kind of things that make us love and make us cry. But where we are makes such a difference in the trajectory of our lives.”

Geography is destiny, he says, while “everyplace has the potential to be home, whether it’s Rochester, New York or Addis Ababa.”

“Every time you move, you reinvent yourself,” he says. “You have an opportunity to recast your own sense of self.”

His own parallel interests in medicine and literature have taken him from Ethiopia to India; from rural Tennessee to Boston; and from Iowa, where he worked in the AIDS clinic while earning his master’s of fine arts at the University of Iowa’s prestigious creative writing program, to Stanford.

“One of the advantages of being a perennial outsider or a peripatetic soul like I am, perhaps you are always more observant, as if you are from Mars,” Verghese muses.

The art of observation was honed through reading, too.

“There are books that call us to medicine,” says Verghese, whose favorite of many was “Of Human Bondage” by W. Somerset Maugham.

“Something about how medicine was described showed me that it could be a passionate pursuit worthy of my whole being,” he says.

Today, he uses literature, including the work of renowned doctor/authors such as Anton Chekhov and William Carlos Williams in his teaching at Stanford, where he is professor for the Theory and Practice of Medicine.

“Students undergo a conversion in the third year of medical school – not pre-clinical to clinical, but pre-cynical to cynical,” he says.

It’s understandable. Faced with the carnage of a city hospital, it is easier to focus on the disease rather than the patient.

To deepen his students’ understanding of death, he assigns “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” by Leo Tolstoy.

“The story makes you imagine the suffering of others,” he says. “Story and narrative are really central to medicine.”

After years spent learning how to read the body for clues, it was only when he got to Iowa that he felt he had the life experience and the writing skills to bring to a novel.

“I realized how rich medicine was to me, how complete a world it was. I wanted to convey the excitement and adventure of learning medicine,” he says.

With “Cutting for Stone,” he hoped to create the kind of book that might inspire a new generation – as Maugham’s novel, and others, inspired him.

“I feel that I put every single thing that I know in this novel,” he says. “I have no idea what comes next. Luckily, I have a good day job.”

SFGate.com

Read a review of Abraham Verghese’s novel “Cutting for Stone” at sfgate.com/ZGAN.

E-mail Heidi Benson at hbenson@sfchronicle.com.

After qualifying seven athletes for the IC4A Championships last week at the Terrier Invitational, the Massachusetts track and field teams are looking to make their presence felt once again at Friday’s Boston Games.

The men’s team will travel to the Reggie Lewis Center on the campus of Roxbury Community College to compete against athletes from all across the globe. The Minutemen have high expectations for this year’s competition following an Atlantic-10 Championship in cross-country and a third place finish (out of 11 teams) in last year’s games.

Junior Tyler Cotto, who qualified for the IC4A Championships with a time of 7.74 seconds in the 55 meter hurdles, is looking for a repeat of his second-place finish in last years Boston Games. At last year’s games, Cotto finished with a time of 7.73 seconds. Junior Jonathan Pierce is also hoping to make another strong impact after taking first place at last years games with a time of 15 minutes, 9.66 seconds in the 5,000 meters.

The women’s team hopes to build off its own strong showing at the Great Dane Classic as they also travel to Roxbury for the Reebok Games.

After starting the season off with a disappointing last place finish at Boston University, the Minutewomen rebounded with an impressive fifth place finish (out of 30 teams) last week in New York City. Redshirt sophomore distance runner Shiyi Zan paced the Minutewomen with 10 of the team’s 55 points.

Led by graduate Danielle Bolt, the Minutewomen finished fifth in a field of 13 teams at last year’s Reebok Games. Looking to fill the void left by Bolt are Zan and senior Kristen Bakanowski. Zan finished 11th last year in the one-mile run, but looks much improved and confident after last week’s performance. Bakanowski took fifth in the pole vault at last year’s meet and was also part of a distance medley team which placed third with a time of 12:29:49.

The Reebok Boston Indoor Games have been home to some of the most recognized athletes and achievements in the history of indoor track and field.

The women’s field is touting the return of Ethiopian sensation Tirunesh Dibaba. Dibaba, 23, is coming off two gold medal performances at the 2008 Beijing Olympics (5,000 and 10,000 meters). American Jenn Stuczynski, the other female Olympian at the competition, was a silver medalist in the pole vault at the 2008 Games after clearing 15 feet 9 inches.

The men’s division is headlined by 2008 Olympians Steve Hooker of Australia and Nick Willis of New Zealand. Hooker won a gold medal in the pole vault, while Willis took home the silver in the 1,500 meters. Hooker is recognized by some as the greatest pole vaulter in Australian history after setting the Olympic record of 5.96 meters in 2008. Willis is known for winning a gold medal in the 2006 Commonwealth Games.

Mike Mastone can be reached at mmastone@student.umass.edu.