Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue
Singular Intimacies: Apt a Doctor at Bellevue Books
Product Description
In the tradition of Abraham Verghese and Atul Gawande, a gripping memoir of learning medicine in the trenches
Singular Intimacies is the tale of apt a doctor by immersion at Bellevue Sickbay, the oldest broadcast sickbay in the people—and perhaps the most legendary. It is both the classic inner-city sickbay and a unique mixture of history, lunacy, beauty, and intellect. When Danielle Ofri enters these 250-year-ancient doors as a tentative medical student, she is immediately plunged into the teeming world of urban medicine: mysterious illnesses, life-and-death decisions, patients speaking any one of a dozen languages, well-worn interns devising creative
strategies to cope with the agitated intensity of a huge-city sickbay.
Yet the emphasis of Singular Intimacies is not so much on the arduous hours in medical training (which certainly exist here), but on the evolution of an instinct for healing. In a sickbay without the luxury of private physicians, where patients lack resources both financial and societal, where poverty and social strife are as much a part of the pathology as any microbe, it is the medical students and interns who are thrust into the searing intimacy that is the doctor-patient relationship. In each memorable chapter, Ofri”s progress toward apt an experienced healer introduces not just a patient in medical crisis, but a human being with an intricate and compelling history. Ofri learns to navigate the tangled vulnerabilities of doctor and patient, not simply battle the disease.
Dr. Danielle Ofri is an attending physician in the medical clinic at Bellevue, with an academic appointment at NYU. She is the co-initiator and editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review, and her essays have been published in over a dozen literary and medical journals; one chapter of this book was selected by Stephen Jay Gould for The Best American Essays of 2002 and received the Missouri Review Editor”s Prize for Nonfiction. She is also associate chief editor of the award-winning textbook The Bellevue Guide to Outpatient Medicine.
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There are precious few excellent books detailing the administer of medical education and rightly so. It would be near impossible to encompass the transformation that occurs in training a physician in one text. Ofri’s book is a excellent attempt at capturing that transformation but, it does fall small not for what it does not include but for what it does.
As a current medical student I find this book a excellent resource for those outside of the medical profession to see what labor and part of time goes into training a physician. But, I feel that in several places the author has taken fantastic liberty in dramatizing medical education or scenarios. Surely, this is for the readers interest but I feel that gives a fake sense of what really goes on in medicine much like Grey’s Anatomy has everyone asking me who I am hooking up with at the sickbay. The places where this literary liberty was taken will most likely not be evident to those outside the medical field and will generally serve as anecdotal for those in medicne.
Overall the book reads well and would serve as a excellent starting top for those interested in learning the general structure of medical education today. I would not reccommend this book for those in the medical field seeking to add depth to their knowledge of medical education
Rating: 3 / 5
I read this book thought that tales written by a doctor would be fascinating. I honestly got tired of hearing the author talk about crying every 10 minutes and all of her self esteem issues. I sought after to hear more tales and less private musings. The tales were fascinating in their own aptly, but went on WAY too long. I would have rather had a more brief description of events and more of them. (more about the patients much less whining and agonizing by the author).
Rating: 2 / 5
Not that medicine isn’t intense, but it seems as though Ofri is writing more to fascinate to expectations of medical training that one gets even as watching sickbay dramas on television. Even as I can appreciate her approach and intent — to show human relationships in the objective world of medicine — I reckon that her overt attempts make the book fall small of what it may possibly be. Her anecdotes are sometimes entrancing, sometimes engulfing, but in many cases are not entirely believable. She overstates the ineptitude of those in training even as playing to expectations of doctors’ callousness and scientific mindsets. Having read this book soon after another in the same genre that was, quite honestly, much better (Atul Gawande’s Complications) I was slightly disappointed with this book.
Rating: 3 / 5
Dr Ofri has written a tender account of a resident doctor’s private experiences. Residency program is indeed a trial (and training) by fire which can either melt or strengthen the heart of a novice doctor. Being a doctor myself, I have been to “hell and back” with many of my patients. There are quite a few Dr Sitkins in the world of medicine : humane and highly sensitive doctors hiding behind a facade who snap when the reality of the harsh world and its inequalities,espeically, in life and death situations become unbearable.
Rating: 3 / 5
This is one of the most incredible books nearly! The author does a magnificent job in portraying her journey of apt and being a doctor; you find yourself both laughing and crying! Her writing style is so honest and simultaneously entertaining! I am soo picky when it comes to books, but I COULD NOT PUT THIS BOOK DOWN!!! It was incredible. I felt like I gained such insight into what it means to go through medical training and become a physician; no other novel/article/text has ever left me with that kind of clarity. Throughout the book I felt so close and connected to the author, like I was rooting for her and sought after her to succeed. She shows the human side of doctoring, the like and care and the struggles and pain. THIS IS A MUST READ!!! Especially for those who are interested in going into health care and med school! I HIGHLY RECOMMEND IT!!
Rating: 5 / 5