About the Book
**AS HEARD ON BBC RADIO 4**
**A BOOK OF THE YEAR IN THE TIMES, DAILY TELEGRAPH AND FINANCIAL TIMES**
As a neurosurgeon, I lived in a world filled with fear and suffering, death and cancer. But rarely, if ever, did I think about what it would be like if what I witnessed at work every day happened to me. This book is the story of how I became a patient myself.
Retired brain surgeon Henry Marsh thought he understood illness, but he was unprepared for the impact of his diagnosis of advanced cancer. And Finally explores what happens when someone who has spent a lifetime on the frontline of life and death finds himself contemplating what might be his own death sentence.
As Henry navigates the bewildering transition from doctor to patient, he is haunted by past failures and projects yet to be completed, and frustrated by the inconveniences of illness and old age. But he is also more entranced than ever by the mysteries of science and the brain, the beauty of the natural world and his love for his family. Elegiac, candid, luminous and poignant, And Finally is ultimately not so much a book about death, but a book about life and what matters in the end.
'Magnificent' Rachel Clarke, author of Breath-taking
'Given its subject - broadly, death and disease - the book is unexpectedly fun, and the author pretty much irresistibly likable' Guardian
'Facing his own mortality, Marsh has written a vividly wry and honest book' The Times
'Marsh shares his journey with a dark yet whimsical humour, and ponders too the eternal mysteries of time' Daily Telegraph, Books of the Year 2022
About the Author :
Henry Marsh is a retired neurosurgeon and the bestselling author of Do No Harm and Admissions. Both books were Sunday Times No. 1 bestsellers, and have been translated into over thirty languages. Do No Harm was awarded the South Bank Sky Arts Award and the PEN Ackerley Prize, and was shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award, Duff Cooper Prize, Wellcome Book Prize and Guardian First Book Award. Marsh was made CBE is 2010. Since retiring from full-time work in the NHS in 2015, he continued to operate and lecture abroad. He is married to the anthropologist Kate Fox, and lives in London and Oxford.
Review :
Henry Marsh may have retired from medicine but let's hope he keeps producing books as good as this one, which enthral as well as teach.
[And Finally] is unexpectedly fun, and the author is pretty much irresistibly likeable... diagnoses and remissions are described with wonderful candour... [and Marsh's] discussion of end-of-life care and assisted dying is the best essay I have read on the subject.
[Marsh is] deeply reflective, the result is a bit like sitting in the pub with the smartest person you know.
Beautifully written... A thoughtful journey into his experience as a doctor-turned-patient, enlivened with a wonderful black humour and a gimlet eye for comforting nonsense... One couldn't wish for a better guide.
His dignified introspection is a joy.
And Finally is a close and courageous look at the prospect of death by someone who has seen it more clearly and more often than most of us, and who writes with great fluency and grace. Henry Marsh is a great neurosurgeon: he is also a very fine writer. I admire this book enormously.
A beautifully written collection of memories, thoughts and life lessons... And Finally will no doubt prompt others to contemplate their own existence and, more importantly, recognise what is truly worth living for.
Vividly wry and honest... this slender, elegant book... is very much a memoir of enlightenment; the humbling, late in life, of a man of great skill and status... A wise and warm narrator, and his book will bring comfort to many - and educate doctors.
[A] fascinating unusually revelatory, ultimately conflicted and poignant account.
Marsh... writes with appealing candour about his reluctance to investigate his own symptoms... [and he] is often drily funny.
Brilliant... [a] ruminative, magisterial, self-questioning, poignant, funny and slightly bonkers memoir.
A surprisingly entertaining, informative report on what happens when an eminent neurosurgeon suddenly becomes the frightened patient... This is a valuable book from the front line of ageing. It may be called And Finally - that slightly droll tone is typical - and it may suggest a closing down, but its gift is open-handedness, a wise and Janus-like looking forward and back.
In the contemplation of death Marsh illuminates the gift of life, rendering it even more precious. And Finally has all the candour, elegance and revelation we've come to expect from Marsh. I read it straight through carried along by the force of its prose and the beauty of its ideas. It's a book to treasure and reread; I'm very grateful for it.
In this superb meditation on life and death, Henry Marsh tackles the matter of mortality with all his trademark wit, wisdom, grace and humility. He turns his formidable intellect and scalpel-sharp prose on himself as well as the medical profession - with marvellous results. Unflinching, profound and deeply humane, And Finally is magnificent.
Who better to ponder immortality, the threshold between states, fear, regret and what gives us meaning, than somebody who has lived a life constantly in-between. We should give thanks to Marsh, who despite facing his own mortality, allows us to come along for this poignant and vivid journey.
An outstanding writer.
Marsh shares his journey with a dark yet whimsical humour, and ponders too the eternal mysteries of time.
A haunting memoir from someone who has spent a career at the fragile border between life and death, now confronting the prospect of his own crossing.
The ever-candid neurosurgeon Henry Marsh describes what it felt like, after a cancer diagnosis, to become part of "the underclass of patients", losing his status as a godlike doctor. He is also grimly humorous about what cancer treatment did to him.
As ever he writes beautifully, his interest in the human body and mind as hummingly alive as ever.
