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

by Henry Marsh

‘I hope you get some sleep,’ I said. ‘I promise you I will, which is more important in the circumstances.’ She smiled at the joke – a joke I make with all my patients when I see them the night before surgery.

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

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

It used to be called angor animi – the anguish of the soul – the feeling that some people have, when they are having a heart attack, that they are about to die.

Besides, with advancing age I can no longer deny that I am made of the same flesh and blood as my patients and that I am equally vulnerable.

In fact the brain cannot itself feel pain since pain is a phenomenon produced within the brain.

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.

‘We are dead. You are still alive. And what are you doing with the time that you have left?’

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