Wendy Moore
Decisions & Incisions
Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery
By Henry Marsh
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 278pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Henry Marsh’s unflinchingly honest and profoundly moving memoir is essentially a long apology to the patients and their relatives whose lives he has, in his own words, ‘wrecked’. Looking back as he nears retirement on a career spanning thirty years, Marsh is haunted by the patients who have died or been left with devastating disabilities as a result of his actions. When one woman whose husband died unexpectedly from a stroke after an operation to remove a tumour asks the surgeon to ‘Remember him in your prayers’, Marsh answers, ‘I remember all my patients who die after operations.’ He adds to himself, ‘I wish I didn’t.’
Brain surgery is rare, brain surgeons even rarer and the chances of Marsh even becoming a brain surgeon were rarer still. Privately educated, he entered Oxford to study PPE but left prematurely after a failed romance and worked for six months as a hospital porter. It was then that he
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
‘He has become a kind of global guru, public intellectual and consultant to the great. He is the ultimate geopolitical gerontocrat.’
From July 2022: Piers Brendon on Henry Kissinger.
Piers Brendon - Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her
Piers Brendon: Margaret Thatcher As I Knew Her - Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy by Henry Kissinger
literaryreview.co.uk
‘Even setting to one side the historically neuralgic relationship with ... Ireland, Britain’s insular periphery has from at least the time of the Romans presented difficulties for authorities wishing to centralise.’
Peter Marshall on Britain's islands.
Peter Marshall - Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago
Peter Marshall: Notes from the Atlantic Archipelago - The Britannias: An Island Quest by Alice Albinia
literaryreview.co.uk
Offer ends soon! Take advantage of our best ever Black Friday offer and get a year's subscription for £29.99.
https://www.mymagazinesub.co.uk/literary-review/promo/blackfriday/