Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: A beautiful collection of stories from the hospital world. Dr Ofri provides a clear view of the resident experience as well as a vivid tales of many patient experiences. I enjoyed the novel very much and highly recommend it to all.

Rating:
Summary: singular intimacies
Review: As a physician in a New York inner city hospital this book held a particular interest for me. Each scenario was described in such beautiful, literary prose that I felt like I was on the wards once again experiencing the same joy and sorrow. This book is a triumph for the medical profession who trains its doctors to follow directions rather than think creatively. Dr. Ofri's book is the first step towards humanizing the medical profession. I would reccommend this book for all human beings!!

Rating:
Summary: Medical training and personal growth
Review: Danielle Ofri expressed clarity and beauty in her writing while conveying experiences from her clinical training. The book, Singular Intimacies, takes us into the emotional and intellectual training of a physician during her transition from medical student, to intern, to resident at Bellevue Hospital in New York City.
Ofri describes some of the hard lessons she was faced with while transitioning one year to the next, including how to treat all her patients with compassion, even those who are difficult or are hard to get along with. I particularly enjoyed the sense of wonder she details while gaining clinical confidence and expertise.
Ofri portrays great insight into medical training which could be useful for those interested in entering a medical profession. Currently in medical school, I felt that this book would appeal to health care workers, students, physicians, and the general public.

Rating:
Summary: wonderfully written and compelling
Review: Danielle Ofri is a gifted writer who offers a rare look at the relationships between doctors and patients. This completely absorbing book could not fail to touth the humanity of everyone who reads it. It soars!

Rating:
Summary: Singular Intimacies
Review: Danielle Ofri is a gifted writer who offers a rare look at the relationships between doctors and patients. This completely absorbing book could not fail to touth the humanity of everyone who reads it. It soars!

Rating:
Summary: Moving, intense, impressive.
Review: Danielle Ofri is a physician who understands that each patient is a human being filled with not only physical symptoms, but stories, secrets, emotions: a whole human existence. This book is a gift to the medical community and will be to an entire generation (and hopefully, generations to come) of patients of that community. May it be widely read.

Rating:
Summary: Writing from Bellevue
Review: Danielle Ofri is the type of doctor you would be lucky to find, should you need one. This book is an extremeley intelligent and sensitive document of the interaction between doctor and patient, health and sickness, and the nature and limits of healing. It's also a hands-on, first person account of what it's like to work in one of the biggest and busiest hospitals in the country. Her essay, "Merced," on a patient who continuted to suffer from a mysterious and unknowable ailment, is a wrenching tale of a doctor who can't help her patient, despite incredible efforts and every modern mechanism. The fate of that patient is gripping and chilling, and she stays with me some three months after reading the book. Finally, for a doctor -- for anyone, in fact -- Danielle Ofri writes like a dream.

Rating:
Summary: Doctors are people, too.....
Review: Danielle Ofri's peek into the making of a physician at Bellevue is clear and compelling. We are caught up in the quivering overwhelm of a novice thrown into the arena of life and death, expected to assess, make decisions, and live with them. Progressing from medical student to intern to resident, we are privy to Ofri's learning by the seat of her pants, to how she absorbs the hard lesson of how to treat with compassion even those patients who are difficult to like, to her sense of wonder as she realizes she is gaining expertise and confidence. In this era of physicians bent on appearing as if they are always in control and on top of things, Ofri bravely exposes her passion, her caring, and her vulnerability as she finds her way through the sometimes dark tunnels of medical academia. As a struggling neophyte, she seems to silently bear her trials without comment. It is gratifying to see that the more confident graduating resident finds her voice, standing up to those who make the system difficult. "Singular Intimacies" can help budding and practicing physicians to be better doctors. And from learning that doctors are people, too, patients can learn to be better patients.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderful
Review: Danielle Ofri's work tours us through the Jekyll and Hyde world of modern medicine while wearing the author's heart very firmly on its sleeve. In Ofri's version of Bellevue Hospital, the goal is always noble: to treat and help every sick person, to the best of the staff's ability. The methods, however, are often Draconian, so if your goal in reading about medicine is to condemn the looming medical industry, you'll find plenty of tinder here. On the other hand, if what you're looking for is searing treatment of the case-by-case emotional trauma of administering medicine to the very sick, this is pitch-perfect. It's well written, certainly, and any individual essay can stand alone, but of greater merit is the aesthetic Ofri brings to her observations. She desperately wants to find the poetry lurking behind each "code," I.V. and intern. More often than not, she finds it. The chapter "Intensive Care" is especially effective, at once a stunning character study and an alarming look behind the veil of medical training. Put it this way: if Dr. Ofri lived anywhere near me, I'd want her to be my doctor.

Rating:
Summary: Singular Work
Review: Danielle Ofri's work tours us through the Jekyll and Hyde world of modern medicine while wearing the author's heart very firmly on its sleeve. In Ofri's version of Bellevue Hospital, the goal is always noble: to treat and help every sick person, to the best of the staff's ability. The methods, however, are often Draconian, so if your goal in reading about medicine is to condemn the looming medical industry, you'll find plenty of tinder here. On the other hand, if what you're looking for is searing treatment of the case-by-case emotional trauma of administering medicine to the very sick, this is pitch-perfect. It's well written, certainly, and any individual essay can stand alone, but of greater merit is the aesthetic Ofri brings to her observations. She desperately wants to find the poetry lurking behind each "code," I.V. and intern. More often than not, she finds it. The chapter "Intensive Care" is especially effective, at once a stunning character study and an alarming look behind the veil of medical training. Put it this way: if Dr. Ofri lived anywhere near me, I'd want her to be my doctor.