"By shedding light on how doctors cope with the stresses and responsibilities of patients, colleagues, lawyers, and their personal lives, she explains why it is important that patients know how emotions influence the way physicians treat their patients both medically and interpersonally. Exploring the full range of human emotion--from the fear of making a fatal mistake to the pride and elation of triumphing over death, What Doctors Feel allows patients at the other end of the stethoscope to have a good listen to the beat of the emotional life behind the white coat."--Beacon Press

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 Singular Intimacies, which the New England Journal of Medicine said captured the essence of becoming and being a doctor, Danielle Ofri led us into the hectic, constantly challenging world of big-city medicine. In Incidental Findings, she's finished her training and is learning through practice to become a more rounded healer. The book opens with a dramatic tale of the tables being turned on Dr. Ofri: She's had to shed the precious white coat and credentials she worked so hard to earn and enter her own hospital as a patient. She experiences the real slight prick and pressure of a long needle as well as the very real sense of invasion and panic that routinely visits her patients. These fifteen intertwined tales include Living Will, where Dr. Ofri treats a man who has lost the will to live, and she too comes dangerously close to concluding that he has nothing to live for; Common Ground, in which a patient's difficult decision to have an abortion highlights the vulnerabilities of doctor and patient alike; Acne, where she is confronted by a patient whose physical and emotional abuse she can't possibly heal, so she must settle on treating the one thing she can, the least of her patient's problems; and finally a stunning concluding chapter, Tools of the Trade, where Dr. Ofri's touch is the last in a woman's long life.

The author offers a compilation of personal anecdotes and reflections based on his forty-year career in medicine as he explores various aspects of his discipline, how it is practiced around the globe, the lives of patients, and how the body works.