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)
“I know not whether the remark is to our honour or otherwise, that lessons of wisdom have never such power over us, as when they are wrought into the heart, through the ground-work of a story which engages the passions: Is it that we are like iron, and must first be heated before we can be wrought upon?”
—Laurence Sterne (1713–1768)
“The doctor should be opaque to his patients and, like a mirror, should show them nothing but what is shown to him.”
—Sigmund Freud (1856–1939)
“The art of living is to function in society without doing violence to one’s own needs or to the needs of others. The art of mothering is to teach the art of living to children.”
—Elaine Heffner (20th century)
“For this invention of yours will produce forgetfulness in the minds of those who learn it, by causing them to neglect their memory, inasmuch as, from their confidence in writing, they will recollect by the external aid of foreign symbols, and not by the internal use of their own faculties. Your discovery, therefore, is a medicine not for memory, but for recollection,—for recalling to, not for keeping in mind.”
—Plato (c. 427–347 B.C.)