Incidental Findings: Lessons From My Patients in The Art of Medicine

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:

    What has history to do with me? Mine is the first and only world! I want to report how I find the world. What others have told me about the world is a very small and incidental part of my experience. I have to judge the world, to measure things.
    Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951)

    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 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.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

    Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. What horrors of damp huts, where human beings languish, may not become picturesque through aerial distance! What hymning of cancerous vices may we not languish over as sublimest art in the safe remoteness of a strange language and artificial phrase! Yet we keep a repugnance to rheumatism and other painful effects when presented in our personal experience.
    George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)

    In view of the fact that the number of people living too long has risen catastrophically and still continues to rise.... Question: Must we live as long as modern medicine enables us to?... We control our entry into life, it is time we began to control our exit.
    Max Frisch (1911–1991)