Dr. Craig Spencer, New York’s first and to date only Ebola patient, said in an essay published on Wednesday that he was falsely accused of putting the public at risk and was superficially depicted as “a fraud, a hipster and a hero” after he was hospitalized last fall.

“The truth is, I am none of those things,” Dr. Spencer wrote in a personal but also polemical essay published online Wednesday in the New England Journal of Medicine. He added: “I’m just someone who answered a call for help and was lucky enough to survive.”

The essay is one of the first times he has given a detailed public accounting of the course of his illness and how it affected him, physically and psychologically. He also recently gave an interview to WNYC radio.

Dr. Spencer, 33, an attending physician in the emergency department of NewYork-Presbyterian/Columbia University Medical Center, wrote that when he returned to New York from Guinea, where he had been treating Ebola patients with Doctors Without Borders, “the suffering I’d seen, combined with exhaustion, made me feel depressed for the first time in my life.”