Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
[Susan Gibbons]Good evening everyone. Welcome. I'm Susan Gibbons I'm vice provost and the
Andrew H. and Janet Dayton Neilly Dean of the River Campus Libraries, and it's my pleasure
to welcome you here tonight. This is our third lecture in our series, the Neilly Series,
this is our tenth year of the Neilly Series, and each year we bring different speakers
to campus. Sometimes they are alums or have some relationship at the University, other
times these are just fantastic individuals that we've been able to bring to campus in
order to create a community, an intellectual community. One not just of the students and
faculty on the campus but a way to bring the Greater Rochester community onto campus and
to join us in these intellectual activities, so I welcome you all here tonight. The reason
why we have this series is through the generosity of Andrew and Janet Dayton Neilly, through
creating an endowment. And that endowment, now in it's tenth year has done a lot to bring
some great speakers to campus so we really are indebted to them for this opportunity.
On your seat hopefully you found the program for the rest of the Neilly Series for the
year. We have, let's see, one-two-three more speakers to come this year. The next one will
be on November eleventh, Curtis White, here in this room at 7:30, so I hope we'll see
you again there. Tonight's speaker will be introduced by one of our colleagues from across
the street, Dr. Clayton Baker. And Dr. Clayton Baker is a clinical assistant professor in
the Department of Medicine at the University of Rochester Medical Center, as well as being
in the Department of Medical Humanities. And it's his role in the Department Medical Humanities
that we thought would best, sort of tie together what we'd like to hear tonight from our main
speaker, bringing together the science of medicine with humanity and with the study
of people, an understanding of people. So with that all turn it over to Doctor Baker
to make introductions. [Dr. Clayton Baker] Thanks. When I was asked to introduce tonight's
speaker Dr. Danielle Ofri, I was eager to jump at the opportunity because I read quite
a lot of her byline, which she has in many of the medical journals, also in some online
sources as well, and she's written a number of very well regarded books as well. But y'know,
all that aside why are we, or why is it so interesting to me to hear her speak? I'd just
sort of offer an aphorism that came to mind, that the most interesting traffic is usually
seen at the intersections, and to give you sort of an image to support that, I'll go
back to when I was traveling many years ago. I, after I got out of college over twenty
years ago, I saved up a little money and went backpacking and found myself in India at one
point and I was riding one of those motorized rickshaws, I don't know if you're familiar
with them, little three wheel things, sort of like the equivalent of the New York City
taxicab in certain parts of India, at least back then. I was riding from one tourist attraction
to the other, and kind of not paying attention to things until we hit this roundabout, this
incredibly huge roundabout not like the little ones that we have here but four, five lanes
across, and it had this huge infield with a platform. There's this guy dressed in this
Victorian looking uniform with a big whistle and white gloves and he was directing all
the traffic and we just ground to a stop. We have been buzzing along at 30 miles an
hour, and all of a sudden we're just absolutely at a dead stop. And suddenly I'm looking around
and I'm noticing the other traffic and there were hundreds of bikes, there were dozens
of other of these motorized rickshaws, there were these little vespa scooters that have
one person on them in Italy, but they have a family on them, at least at this time in
India, it was like the family minivan y'know. You had a kid sitting between the father's
legs who is driving, the mother holding someone sitting sidesaddle in the back and so on.
And then there were the animals. In the trucks and buses and there were the animals. There's
even an elephant, this is true, just sort of meandering through everyone's going around
it. It was a really striking image for me at the time for two reasons. Number one, because
I just hadn't noticed anything that was going on, up until I came to a dead stop at this
intersection, if you will. And I think that this is really true in medicine too, because
we go a million miles an hour, and we don't see things. And, at least I don't, sometimes.
And someone who is at these intersections like Dr. Ofri helps us to step back and see
things. And part of, give an example of of one of the intersections that I think she
works at is her hospital, Bellevue, which of course is famous, one of the most famous
hospitals in the United States, I think the oldest public hospital in the United States,
and just covers the whole gamut in terms of any type of patient, and I think she's going
to speak a little bit about that tonight. And also, she works between the intersection
between medicine and other disciplines. Writing, obviously, the sort of modern media, in terms
of some of the work that she does online, and editing and publishing, being one of the
founding editors and I think still their chief editor for the Bellevue Literary Review, which
is very successful and very, I highly recommend, excellent of literary magazine, or periodical
I should say, with a medical bent, I guess you could say. So she works at all of these
intersections and she allows us to step back and see this big picture that sometimes we
kind of race past, or at least I do. And so I really think it's a pleasure to have her
here and I'm very excited to hear her speak and to share from her book, and so without
any further ado, Dr. Danielle Ofri, she'll be talking about Medicine in Translation:
Journeys with My Patients. [Danielle Ofri] Thank you. It's really a pleasure to be here
and to be part of this University for 36 hours it feels as though, I'm in many different
departments. I do want to put in a plug for our literary magazine The Bellevue Literary
Review, the first literary magazine from a hospital. We're putting our tenth year, next
year, so I put out some buy one get one free subscription forms in the back. The holidays
are coming, most gives either raise your LDL or increase your waistline, this one doesn't.
And all covers are archival photos from Bellevue, this particular one is from the Bellevue chest
service. It's in one of the outdoor terraces where people got fresh air before being triaged
by this young doctor in the back to either go to Saranac in Upstate New York senatorial,
or to the Bellevue chest ward and they got a half gram of morphine, a shot of whiskey
for their trip. So these last two days I've given a series of lectures that draw a little
bit from the books, but I want to talk a bit about how this particular book came to be
and a little bit about how writing plays a role in my life. I didn't at all plan to be
a writer. I was a straight science major all the way, I never took any time off, but after
residency, I did high school I did college and then I did an MD PhD program with an interim
medical residency, so I was in school for a very, very long time. All my friends were
taking years off in Europe, and they were traveling, and going to Keibwitz, and backpacking
in India. I was, y'know, taking my boards. But after, when I was an intern, a close,
childhood friend of mine died of a cardiac arrest at age 27. He had had a congenital
heart condition called IHSS, idiopathic hypertrophic subaortic stenosis, that I had known about,
he told me about when I was a medical student. And his father had it and they were being
studied in NIH, but he was not ever symptomatic, and then he simply dropped dead, and this
was the fall of my internship year, and I would say that's the first time I ever stopped
for a moment to look at the traffic around me. I think having gone a million miles an
hour and I've never really stood still and I think that was the first time I began to
veer off the the path. And I realized that, well I wondered, what was I rushing toward?
I had been going, going, going for the next thing, the next thing, the next thing and
Josh's death really made me step back and think about where where the rush was to. Starting
with that I began to think about taking some time off, and by the time I finished my 10th
year at Bellevue, I had had about as much of death and illness as I could handle for
the moment. I needed to be away geographically, temporally, stylistically, and so I, of course
I had student loans to pay off, I had lots of them, so I had signed up with a local tennants
agency, which is temp work for doctors. And so I worked in small towns in America for
about four to six to eight weeks, usually filling in for a short-staffed practice, and
then when I finished that stint, I would travel for as long as the money would last, and then
I would call my agent collect from Wohaka, or wherever I was and say, "well what have
you got for next week?", and I'd end up in New Hampshire and do this for the course of
about 18 to 20 months. And it was the first time I had been away from academia, away from
medicine, and I remember I canceled my medical journals and I got all these novels and I
got my first laptop, and I remember the feeling of just wanting to break down some of these
stories.