Anthony Campbell's Blog 1

Henry Marsh is a neurosurgeon who has headed his department at a London hospital for many years and has worked in the Ukraine to help set up neurosurgery there. In this book he provides an extraordinarily vivid account of his work and its emotional impact both on himself and on his patients and their relatives. The book consists of a large number of short chapters, each of which tells a story usually linked to a particular kind of brain abnormality. Some chapters are autobiographical and tell us about events in Marsh's own life and how he came to study medicine and become a neurosurgeon.

Patients, Marsh says, invest their doctors with superhuman qualities as a way of overcoming their fears when undergoing surgery.

The reality, of course, is entirely different. Doctors are human like the rest of us. Much of what happens in hospitals is a matter of luck, both good and bad; success and failure are often out of the doctor's control. Knowing when not to operate is just as important as knowing how to operate, and is a more difficult skill to acquire.

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