Singular Intimacies Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue

When Danielle Ofri enters the doors of New Yorkas legendary Bellevue Hospital as a tentative medical student, she is 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 intensity of a big-city hospital. In a facility 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. With each chapter, Ofri introduces us to a new medical crisis and a human being with an intricate and compelling history.

Dr. Danielle Ofri, author of Singular Intimacies (Beacon / 7252-4 / $24.00 hc), is an attending physician at Bellevue and the cofounder and editor-in-chief of the Bellevue Literary Review. She is currently a regular contributor to the Los Angeles Times and the New England Journal of Medicine.