Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

by Henry Marsh

Daunting part of Medicine

‘The best is the enemy of the good,’

- Henry Marsh

Psychological research has shown that the most reliable route to personal happiness is to make others happy.

We have achieved most as surgeons when our patients recover completely and forget us completely.

Whereas the surgeon, for a while, has known heaven, having come very close to hell.

One quarter of the blood pumped every minute by the heart, after all, goes to the brain. Thought is an energy-intensive process.

But I then thought of how the value of my work as a doctor is measured solely in the value of other people’s lives,

The eyes are said by poets to be the windows to the soul but they are also windows to the brain:

The right frontal lobe of the human brain does not have any specific role in human life that is clearly understood.

suprasellar

‘it will happen to you anyway. If I treat you, with a bit of luck, you might have some years of reasonable life but if we do nothing you have only a few months left to live.’

‘But death is not always a bad outcome, you know, and a quick death can be better than a slow one.’

you never know for certain what you will decide until it happens.

transverse slices of the scan appear on the computer monitor, gradually working their way up towards where I had been operating. The scan

social status as

He said that it was best to see medicine as a form of craft, neither art nor science

‘The operating is the easy part, you know,’ he said. ‘By my age you realize that the difficulties are all to do with the decision-making.’

gung-ho,

‘There’s ten minutes left,’

The pressure of the artery on the nerve is responsible for the pain though the exact mechanism is not understood.

Trigeminal Neuralgia

I found an abnormally large vein blocking access to the trigeminal nerve.

Trigeminal nerve

distinctly unhappy. ‘I’ll do it all myself,’ I