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

by Henry Marsh

The lobectomized men were, it seemed to me, some of the worst affected of the patients – dull and apathetic and zombie-like. I was shocked to find, when surreptitiously looking at their notes, that there was no evidence of any kind of follow-up or post-operative assessment. In all the patients who had been lobectomized there would be a brief note stating ‘Suitable for lobectomy. For transfer to AMH’. The next entry would read ‘Returned from AMH. For removal of black silk sutures in nine days’, and that was it. There might be the occasional entry years later stating, for instance ‘Called to see. Fight with other patient. Scalp laceration sutured’, but other than the notes made at the time of the patient’s first admission to the hospital, usually with an episode of acute psychosis, the medical notes were empty even though the patients had been in the hospital for many decades.