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.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?”
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“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
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“The essential function of art is moral.... But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood, rather than the mind.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“After you eat always take a walk, and you’ll never have to go to a medicine shop.”
—Chinese proverb.
Rhyme.