Introduction

[摘要] The title of Danielle Ofri's second collection of reflections on her professional life as an attending physician Incidental Findings comes, as she explains in the prologue to the book, from her own experience of turning up with her husband for a routine antenatal screening in one of NYU's private clinics, and discovering, to her alarm, that the sonographic image of her baby's umbilical cord reveals an anomaly. But is it an anomaly which means something? Her colleague tries to put her in the picture. ‘The radiologist has already ascertained that I am a doctor and fellow faculty member. “Just one thing,” he says, leaning his torso into the room, “the umbilical cord is missing one artery, but it's probably an incidental finding. The literature says that 20% can have chromosomal abnormalities, but you’ve already done the amnio to check for that, and 20% can have growth retardation, but we’ll be able to check that with another ultrasound in 3 weeks, so it's probably a normal anatomical variant.”’

[学科分类] 卫生学