Do No Harm

Henry Marsh

What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someone’s life in your hands, to cut through the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences when it all goes wrong? Written with astonishing candour and compassion, Do No Harm is an unforgettable insight into the highs and lows of a life dedicated to medicine’s most challenging field. Henry Marsh reveals the exhilarating drama of the operating theatre, the chaos and confusion of the modern hospital, the exquisite complexity of the human brain, and agonising life-and-death decisions surgeons and their patients face every day. Above all it is a lesson in the need for hope when faced with life’s most difficult choices.

First published:: 2014
Published by:: Orion
Length:: Hardcover 320 pages

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About the author

Henry Marsh read Politics, Philosophy and Economics at Oxford University before studying medicine at the Royal Free Hospital in London. He became a Fellow of the Royal College of Surgeons in 1984 and was appointed Consultant Neurosurgeon at Atkinson Morley’s/St George’s Hospital in London in 1987, where he still works full time. He has been the subject of two major documentary films: Your Life in Their Hands, which won the Royal Television Society Gold Medal, and The English Surgeon, featuring his work in the Ukraine, which won an Emmy. He was made a CBE in 2010. He is married to the anthropologist and writer Kate Fox.