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

by Henry Marsh

The idea that my sucker is moving through thought itself, through emotion and reason, that memories, dreams and reflections should consist of jelly, is simply too strange to understand.

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

The city beyond was almost oppressive in its clarity – an unrelenting view of buildings, inhuman in scale and size – an inappropriate view, I thought, for somebody who was dying.

Neuroscience tells us that it is highly improbable that we have souls, as everything we think and feel is no more or no less than the electrochemical chatter of our nerve cells. Our sense of self, our feelings and our thoughts, our love for others, our hopes and ambitions, our hates and fears all die when our brains die. Many people deeply resent this view of things, which not only deprives us of life after death but also seems to downgrade thought to mere electrochemistry and reduces us to mere automata, to machines. Such people are profoundly mistaken, since what it really does is upgrade matter into something infinitely mysterious that we do not understand.

Hope is beyond price and the pharmaceutical companies, which are run by businessmen not altruists, price their products accordingly.