About the Book
What is it really like to be a brain surgeon, to hold someone's life in your hands, to drill down into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong
In this powerful, gripping and brutally honest account, one of the country's top neurosurgeons reveals what it is to play god in the face of the life-and-death situations he encounters daily. Henry Marsh gives a rare insight into the intense drama of the operating theatre, the chaos and confusion of a modern hospital, the exquisite complexity of the human brain, and the blunt instrument that is surgeon's knife by comparison.
In neurosurgery, the doctor's oath to 'do no harm' holds a bitter irony, as all operations on the brain carry grave risks. This book is about the agonising human dilemmas behind every operation - for the patient, their families and for the surgeon. It is also a deeply personal account - an education in Marsh's own fallibility, the limitations of medicine, the corrupting influence of power, and, above all, the universal need for hope when faced with life's most difficult decisions.
About the Author :
Henry Marsh read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University before studying medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984 and was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley's/St George's in 1987, where he still works full time. He has been the subject of two major documentary films, YOUR LIFE IN THEIR HANDS, which won the ROYAL TELEVISION SOCIETY GOLD MEDAL, and THE ENGLISH SURGEON, which won an EMMY. He has lectured widely on the subject of hospital architecture and design. In his spare time he keeps bees and makes furniture. He was made a CBE in 2010. He is married to the anthropologist and writer Kate Fox.
http://www.theenglishsurgeon.com/
Review :
Neurosurgery has met its Boswell in Henry Marsh. Painfully honest about the mistakes that can 'wreck' a brain, exquisitely attuned to the tense and transient bond between doctor and patient, and hilariously impatient of hospital management, Marsh draws us deep into medicine's most difficult art and lifts our spirits. It's a superb achievement
An enthralling read . . . a testimony of wonder . . . Marsh's style is admirably clear, concise and precise . . There is no forcing of a narrative arc or a happy ending, just the quotidian frustrations, sorrows, regrets and successes of neurosurgical life
An elegant series of meditations at the closing of a long career. Many of the stories are moving enough to raise tears, but at the heart this is a book about wisdom and experience
[Do No Harm] simply tells the stories, with great tenderness, insight and self-doubt . . . Why haven't more surgeons written books, especially of this prosaic beauty? Well, thank God for Henry Marsh . . . What a bloody, splendid book: commas optional
Incredibly absorbing . . . an astonishingly candid insight
Riveting . . . extraordinarily intimate, compassionate and sometimes frightening . . . [Marsh] writes with uncommon power and frankness
Offers an astonishing glimpse into this stressful career. This is a wonderful book, passionate and frank. If Marsh is even a tenth as good a neurosurgeon as he is a writer, I'd let him open my skull any time
Henry Marsh . . . sets a new standard for telling it like it is . . . His love for brain surgery and his patients shines through, but the specialty - shrouded in secrecy and mystique when he entered it - has now firmly had the rug pulled out from under it. We should thank Henry Marsh for that
When a book opens like this: "I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing" - you can't let it go, you have to read on, don't you? . . . I trust completely the skills of those who practise [brain surgery], and tend to forget the human element, which is failures, misunderstandings, mistakes, luck and bad luck . . . Do No Harm by Henry Marsh reveals all of this, in the midst of life-threatening situations, and that's one reason to read it; true honesty in an unexpected place
As gripping and engrossing as the best medical drama, only with the added piquancy of being entirely true, this compelling account of what it's really like to be a brain surgeon will have you on the edge of your sunlounger
A mesmerising, at times painful journey through a neurosurgeon's extraordinary career. As delicate as he can be brutal, Marsh's account of himself is always honest and moving. Human frailty at its strongest
A strikingly honest and humane account of what it means to hold the power of life and death in your hands . . . elegant, edifying and necessary
Marsh has written a book about a love affair, and one cannot help feeling similarly smitten . . . 'Elegant, delicate, dangerous and full of profound meaning'. All four of those epithets might describe this book
A fascinating look inside the head of a man whose job it is to fiddle around in ours. He acknowledges that surgeons are arrogant, that they play God, but that they are also afflicted by despair, sorrow and doubt. He is scathing on NHS bureaucracy and his picture of doctors doing their best but basically flailing in the dark made me respect the profession more
