Aaron

“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

“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

“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

“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