Singular Intimacies

"Danielle Ofri, an attending physician at Bellevue . . . writes movingly of the human connections between doctor and patient. [Singular Intimacies is] a cohesive narrative of a compassionate and perceptive doctor’s development. When she began her initiation on the wards as a third-year medical student, the author left the orderly routine of classroom and research laboratory (she had already earned a Ph.D. in biochemistry) for the chaos, ambiguities, and rich rewards of learning how to help living and dying men and women in an inner-city hospital. With her first patient, the grandfatherly Zalman Wiszhinsky, she learns not only how to draw blood but the singular intimacy of sharing another human being’s life-and-death experience. A cast of vivid characters—a Riker’s Island prisoner with an AA battery in his stomach, an obnoxious and abusive drug addict, a psychiatrist in fierce denial about his lethal pancreatic cancer, a middle-aged woman in a permanent coma—all play a role in Ofri’s complex emotional and intellectual growth. She shares her feats, her humiliations, her failures, her uncertainties, her growing competence, and her triumphs. What is unmistakable, however, is that long before becoming a thoroughly trained and skilled physician, Ofri was already a singularly caring woman, aware of her patients as real-live fellow human beings." —Kirkus Reviews
Singular Intimacies is the story of becoming a doctor by immersion at New York’s Bellevue Hospital, the oldest public hospital in the country—and perhaps the most legendary. It is both the classic inner-city hospital and a unique amalgam of history, insanity, beauty, and intellect. When Danielle Ofri enters the doors of this 250-year-old institution as a tentative medical student, she is immediately plunged into the teeming world of urban medicine: mysterious illnesses, patients speaking any one of a dozen languages, overworked interns devising audacious strategies to cope with the feverish intensity of a big-city hospital.

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 hospital 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 becoming 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 to simply battle the disease.

"Danielle Ofri is a finely gifted writer, a born storyteller as well as a born physician, and through these fifteen brilliantly written episodes covering the years from studenthood to the end of her medical residency, we get not only a deep sense of the high drama of life and death which must face anyone working in a great hospital, but a feeling for the making of a physician's mind and soul, and for her bravery and vulnerabilities as she goes through the long years of apprenticeship."

—Oliver Sacks, M.D., author of Awakenings and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

"A searing, tough, and tender story of a young woman learning not only to be a humane doctor but truly human—all the more remarkable for her teacher being the grande dame of city hospitals, Bellevue, and her patients being the whole New York City world. Written with courage, humility, art, and heart." —Samuel Shem, author of The House of God and Mount Misery

"Danielle Ofri stands observing at the crossroads of the remarkable lives that intersect at Bellevue. She is dogged, perceptive, unafraid, and willing to probe her own motives as well as those of others. This is what it takes for a good physician to arrive at the truth, and these same qualities make her an essayist of the first order." —Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner and My Own Country

"This is a beautiful book about souls and bodies, sadness and healing at a legendary hospital. Danielle Ofri has so much to say about the remarkable intimacies between doctor and patient, about the bonds and the barriers, and above all about how doctors come to understand their powers and their limitations. This is a book written in lyrical language about a hospital that cares for the poor and the homeless, a book which celebrates the complexity of life and death." —Perri Klass, M.D., author of Love and Modern Medicine: Stories and Other Women's Children

"Heartwarming memoirs of a young woman’s years at a venerable New York City hospital, where she is transformed from bewildered medical student to assured physician. . . . Let’s hope there’s a whole library of books to come from this talented physician/writer." —Kirkus Reviews

Medicina e Saúde / Não-ficção