And Finally: Matters of Life and Death

by Henry Marsh

This was before mobile phones, and I had to carry an air call bleep. If it went off when I was not at home, I would have to find a telephone somewhere. I once had to go into a hamburger restaurant and beg the use of a phone. I gave my junior instructions as to how to insert a drain into a patient’s brain, while the restaurant staff listened, obviously fascinated. I was rather annoyed when they

After my son’s successful surgery for a brain tumour when he was only three months old, he had follow-up brain scans for the next ten years.

It is rather like misdiagnosis in medicine, as I would tell my trainees: the further you go down the wrong route, the more difficult it gets to go back and reconsider things.

I did not have to trick patients into trusting me when I first met them. But the problem with medicine is that it is uncertain – doctors deal in percentages, and like the weather forecast, can only be wrong if they make a prediction with 100 per cent certainty, which they never do. We often hear the refrain ‘The doctors gave me six months to live, and here I am six years later’, when, almost certainly, the doctors had told the patient he or she might only live for another six months. As for the ones who did die within six months – we do not hear from them.

Like many retired surgeons I know, I take more pride in the successful careers of surgeons I have helped train than in all the patients I treated over the years. It is a great privilege to be part of a great tradition.

You stand on the peak of a mountain of pebbles and, if you are lucky, you might add a few pebbles of your own.

I am often wrong but it’s important to demonstrate just how fallible I can be.