A revealing look into the life and work of a modern neurosurgeon—its triumphs and disasters—that already has become a New York Times bestseller.
What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someone's life in your hands, to cut into the stuff that creates thought, feeling, and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially lifesaving operation when it all goes wrong?
In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor's oath to "do no harm" holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks. Every day, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh must make agonizing decisions, often in the face of great urgency and uncertainty.
If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practiced by calm and detached doctors, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again. With astonishing compassion and candor, Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets, and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeon's life. Ranking alongside the works of Atul Gawande, Jerome Groopman, and Oliver Sacks,Do No Harm provides unforgettable insight into the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern hospital. Above all, it is a lesson in the need for hope when faced with life's most difficult decisions.
• With a new coda
Publisher: Macmillan
Original Binding: Trade Paperback
Pages: 320 pages
ISBN-10: 125009013X
Item Weight: 0.6 lbs
Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.9 x 8.2 inches
Customer Reviews: 4 out of 5 stars 10,001 to 50,000 ratings
"Riveting...[Marsh] gives us an extraordinarily intimate, compassionate and sometimes frightening understanding of his vocation."--The New York Times
"The Knausgaard of neurosurgery...Marsh writes like a novelist."--The New Yorker
"Like the work of his fellow physicians Jerome Groopman and Atul Gawande, Do No Harm offers insight into the life of doctors and the quandaries they face as we throw our outsize hopes into their fallible hands."--The Washington Post
HENRY MARSH studied medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London, became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984 and was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley's/St George's Hospital in London in 1987. 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 was made a CBE in 2010. He is married to the anthropologist and writer Kate Fox.
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