Booklist

Ofri supported a postgraduate semisabbatical by taking temporary assignments, filling in where needed at a variety of hospitals and clinics as she traveled the country.  The experience, originally planned as a quasi vacation to recover from the rigors of medical residency, resulted in much more than she bargained for.  Indeed, Ofri learned more--the incidental findings of the title--about the softer emotional underbelly of medicine than she had picked up clinically.  One can’t help wondering whether this exceptional series of introspective essays on her experience serves more to remind the Bellevue physician, as she now is, of patients’ basic humanity than to record that humanity for posterity.  The musings seem drawn from her very marrow and too personally raw to be originally intended for broad distribution.  “In the end,” she concludes, “medicine will always be about one patient and one physician together in one room, connecting through the most basic of communication systems: touch.”  Good writing + good doctor = good reading.

Booklist 3/1/05