A Tale of Two Phone Calls
There’s a lot we can learn from animals in many facets of life—Lord knows, a nice massage behind the ears could do a lot of us some good—but I am consistently impressed by how much smoother veterinary medicine runs. More
When Unemployed Means Unhealthy Too
Research confirms what physicians observe and what everyone seems to know in their gut: losing a job is bad for our health. Our crazy patchwork system that ties health insurance to our jobs means that the recession—and its “jobless recovery”—are damaging our nation’s health. More
A Patient, a Death, but No One to Grieve
What if a patient dies and nobody is there to mourn? Is it like a tree falling silently in the forest? More
Scenes From the Lives They Lived in the City
”Nine P.M.,” somebody shouted. ”Rikers bus rollin’ in!” I stepped out of the Bellevue E.R. into the chilly spring night to see what the excitement was. Just pulling in was a school bus, the kind I’d taken every day in elementary school… More
Treating Patients When Language Is Only One of the Barriers
A defective heart, a child detained by border guards — Julia Barquero had already had her struggles. But now her physician at Bellevue Hospital Center, Dr. Danielle Ofri, was trying to explain to Ms. Barquero that she could not receive a heart transplant because she was an illegal immigrant. More
Sometimes, Doctors Find Answers Far Off the Charts
Sometimes it is only when the patient is halfway out the door that the important information spills out. The “hand on the doorknob” phenomenon is well known in medicine. More
At a Bustling City Clinic, Esperanto Would Come In Handy
Despite three long years of high school French, the best I could come up with was “Je m’appelle Dr. Ofri.” More
A Literary Review at Bellevue? Believe It
“Just tell me a story,” Dr. Danielle Ofri admonishes her medical students and interns at morning rounds. To Dr. Ofri, an attending physician at Bellevue Hospital Center, a part-time writer and the editor in chief of the Bellevue Literary Review, every patient’s history is a mystery story, a narrative that unfolds full of surprises, exposing the vulnerability at the human core. More
New York Times review of “Medicine in Translation”
In “Medicine in Translation: Journeys With My Patients” Danielle Ofri introduces us to a Tibetan hunger striker, a Turkish man who was tortured for his human rights advocacy, a fragile Chinese couple and a Senegalese man whose radiation therapy for cancer is discontinued because Medicaid will not pay for his daily transportation for treatment.Their stories are recounted in compelling and intimate detail… More
New York Times review of “Incidental Findings”
Ofri’s thoughtful and honest second book…is equal parts “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat” and “Kitchen Confidential.” The title is inspired by her realization, during her own amniocentesis, that conditions that seem minor to doctors are monumental when they happen to you. More
NY Times review of the Bellevue Literary Review
Bellevue may be the only municipal hospital in the country to have a literary review. It has attracted well-known writers despite not paying its contributors. The review has published poems by Philip Levine, David Lehman and Sharon Olds. There is also a poem by Julia Alvarez called “Bellevue,” which reads, “My mother used to say that she’d end up/ at Bellevue if we didn’t all behave.” More
Another Birth at Bellevue: A New Literary Magazine
For more than 200 years, as America’s oldest public hospital, Bellevue Hospital Center has seen the gamut of human experience and emotion. Birth and death, healing and sickness, bliss and agony are daily occurrences. More
Alistair Cooke, Childhood Malapropism
(Just for fun, here’s my first ever ‘publication’ in the New York Times: a letter I wrote as a medical student, after the death of a PBS icon of my childhood.) More
