Aaron > Aaron's Quotes

“Healthy people, I have concluded, including myself, do not understand how everything changes once you have been diagnosed with a fatal illness. How you cling to hope, however false, however slight, and how reluctant most doctors are to deprive patients of that fragile beam of light in so much darkness. Indeed, many people develop what psychiatrists call ‘dissociation’ and a doctor can find himself talking to two people – they know that they are dying and yet still hope that they will live. I had noticed the same phenomenon with my mother during the last few days of her life. When faced by people who are dying you are no longer dealing with the rational consumers assumed by economic model-builders, if they ever existed in the first place.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery - as seen on 'life-changing' BBC documentary Confessions of a Brain Surgeon

“Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray – a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures.’ René Leriche, La philosophie de la chirurgie, 1951”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“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.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“But death is not always a bad outcome, you know, and a quick death can be better than a slow one.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“Surgeons must always tell the truth but rarely, if ever, deprive patients of all hope. It can be very difficult to find the balance between optimism and realism.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery

“Few people outside medicine realize that what tortures doctors most is uncertainty, rather than the fact they often deal with people who are suffering or who are about to die. It is easy enough to let somebody die if one knows beyond doubt that they cannot be saved - if one is a decent doctor one will be sympathetic, but the situation is clear. This is life, and we all have to die sooner or later. It is when I do not know for certain whether I can help or not, or should help or not, that things become so difficult.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“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.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“You might expect that seeing so much pain and suffering might help you keep your own difficulties in perspective but, alas, it does not.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery

“The corridors and rooms were starting to fill with unfamiliar faces and patients the size of small whales being wheeled past on trolleys.”
― Henry Marsh, Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery