Articles & Media
White Hot Light
Frank Huyler was different than the other doctor-writers I’d been reading. His patients weren’t named, not even with pseudonyms. They weren’t meticulously described with MFA-honed adjectives. His language seemed ordinary, his sentence structures plain. There was no thesaurus lurking just beyond the page. But it was not a literary laziness. It was a seduction. More
Florence Nightingale in the age of Covid-19
May of 2020 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Florence Nightingale. That her bicentennial fell during a worldwide pandemic is both illuminating and ironic. Nightingale’s experience as a nurse during the Crimean War led her to three insights that came to define her professional life, insights as revolutionary as they were unpopular. More
How to Improve the Doctor-Patient Relationship
Danielle Ofri talks with Elena Sung from the “Power of the Patient Project” about how to improve the doctor-patient relationshipe. More
The Vaccine Anthropologist
The world’s richest countries are now its most vaccine-hesitant. Can we learn to trust our shots before the next pandemic? Danielle Ofri profiles Heidi Larson, a “vaccine anthropologist,” for The New Yorker. More
BLR Spring Celebration
Danielle Ofri hosted this event celebrating the winners of the 2021 BLR literary prizes: featuring exciting new works of fiction, nonfiction and poetry, plus interviews by BLR editors More
Taking Stock of the Second Covid Surge
As the pandemic raged from the winter surge through to the spring slog, my Postmortem folder lit up with a dispiriting regularity. I opened it with dread as it revealed which of my patients had perished that week. More
Reading the Body: Poetry, Dance & Disability
“Reading the Body,” explores disability through dance and poetry. Four acclaimed dancers create original choreography based on BLR poetry, More
Covid Writing Goes Viral
Covid Writing Goes Viral: How Literary & Social Media Writing Became a Lifeline during the Pandemic More
Black in the Ivory
Doctor-writers discuss how writing writing can–or cannot–confront racism in academia and healthcare. More
The Doctors Blackwell
Few people today know much about what Elizabeth Blackwell actually did, and fewer are even aware of her younger sister Emily, by far the more accomplished clinician. More
Covid Duets
Given the death and destruction all around us during the Covid pandemic, it felt unseemly to complain about coming home to a strange cello every night. More
“Frontline Workers”
Even after Covid-19 is tamed by the forthcoming vaccines, health care workers will still be frontline workers. Because you never know what will show up tomorrow. More
Covid Diary–New Yorker
During March and April of 2020, New York City experienced the Covid surge that many other localities faced later. I kept a journal during these frightening weeks, talking with my colleagues and patients at Bellevue, as we grappled with how we could manage primary-care medicine during a pandemic. More
M&M
The body wasn’t even cold when they informed me that I would be presenting the case at M & M. I had never killed anyone before, so I didn’t know what to expect. I mean I had been to M & M before, but never as victim. More
Danielle Ofri in conversation with Oliver Sacks–Video
Danielle Ofri in conversation Oliver Sacks. Hear the full conversation, ranging from the ethics of using patients’ stories, to the ins and outs of hallucinations, to the relative merits of Bach versus Beethoven. More
