A collection of essays by physician-writer Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, Incidental Findings: Lessons from my Patients in the Art of Medicine is the story of Ofri practicing medicine in small towns across America, then returning to teach and practice at Bellevue Hospital, America’s oldest public hospital. Ofri writes about dealing with patients speaking every language and of the challenge of training the next generation of doctors. She also writes about her experience being a patient.
The essay Living Will from Incidental Findings was selected by Susan Orlean for Best American Essays 2005. The essay Common Ground from Incidental Findings was selected by Oliver Sacks for Best American Science Writing 2003 and given Honorable Mention by Anne Fadiman for Best American Essays 2004.
Ofri is a practicing internist at Bellevue Hospital and the editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. She is also the author of Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue.
Famous quotes containing the words incidental, lessons, patients, art and/or medicine:
“Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received.”
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“But what help from these fineries or pedantries? What help from thought? Life is not dialectics. We, I think, in these times, have had lessons enough of the futility of criticism.”
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“The peace loving nations must make a concerted effort in opposition to those violations of treaties and those ignorings of humane instincts which today are creating a state of international anarchy and instability from which there is no escape through mere isolation or neutrality.... When an epidemic of physical disease starts to spread, the community approves and joins in a quarantine of the patients in order to protect the health of the community against the spread of the disease.”
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