11/17/2025
Join us Wed, Dec 3 at 5:30 for our next Cactus Book Club. We’re thrilled to have the - Division of Infectious Diseases lead the discussion in belated honor of World AIDS Day. We’re reading the 1994 Lambda Award winning memoir “My Own Country: A Doctor’s Story” by Abraham Verghese. “When the Ethiopian-born son of Indian schoolteachers, emigrated to the U.S. and settled in Johnson City, Tennessee, in the mid-1980s, he finally felt at peace ‘in my own country’ at last. But his work at the Johnson City Medical Center soon led him into a shadow world of Bible-belt AIDS, often without the support of his colleagues”…”a doctor unique in his abilities; as an outsider who could talk to people suspicious of local practitioners; above all, as a writer of grace and compassion who saw that what was happening in this conservative community was both a medical and a spiritual emergency”.
Recommended bookseller: 🦁
“MCW - Division of Infectious Disease (ID) offers a wide range of inpatient and outpatient clinical services related to the care of patients with infectious diseases. We provide care to more than 900 individuals living with HIV in the Froedtert & MCW ID Clinic and prescribe HIV prevention medication to more than 1000 patients. We also provide HIV linkage to care services, social work case management, and RN case management to patients living with HIV. The ID Division collaborated with the Froedtert & MCW Emergency Medicine Department to implement the first emergency-room based universal HIV screening initiative in Wisconsin” 🩺
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ABOUT: Cactus Book Club (CBC) meets on the first Wednesday of the month from 5:30-7:30 in the back room at Cactus Club. Each month a different community organization, collective, mutual aid group, or business chooses the book & recommended bookseller then leads the discussion. We read sociopolitical fiction and non-fiction, with a focus on works by women, LGBTQ+, BIPOC, and/or otherwise under-published groups. You don’t have to finish reading the book to attend. All book club meetings are free. No registration required. 18+. Contact [email protected] with questions or suggestions
