Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death and Brain Surgery by Henry Marsh – taking us 'deep into both the human brain and the entrails of the NHS'
Reviews on Amazon: Neurosurgery has met its Boswell in Henry Marsh. Painfully honest about the mistakes that can 'wreck' a brain, exquisitely attuned to the tense and transient bond between doctor and patient, and hilariously impatient of hospital management, Marsh draws us deep into medicine's most difficult art and lifts our spirits. It's a superb achievement (Ian McEwan)
As gripping and engrossing as the best medical drama, only with the added piquancy of being entirely true, this compelling account of what it's really like to be a brain surgeon will have you on the edge of your sunlounger (Sandra Parsons DAILY MAIL 'Summer Reading')
Do No Harm is a difficult book to read, not formally or technically - Marsh has a fluid, informal style - but because of the sheer sense of exposure. Puns aside, neurosurgery is at the cutting edge of what it means to be, not only a doctor with limited power to cure or palliate, but to be human ... The simple idea that doctors themselves are of the same flesh and blood as their patients, a fact often forgotten on both sides of the relationship, is at the core of ... Do No Harm (Seamus Sweeney TLS)
A mesmerising, at times painful journey through a neurosurgeon's extraordinary career. As delicate as he can be brutal, Marsh's account of himself if always honest and moving. Human frailty at its strongest. (Jessie Burton, author of THE MINIATURIST)
This is a beautifully written, humane, moving and darkly funny memoir by a senior consultant neuro-surgeon at St George's Hospital, Tooting... I was fascinated by this frank view of life on the other side of the anaesthetic mist. It takes us deep into both the human brain and the entrails of the NHS, and it is sometimes hard to know which is the more alarming (Patrick Marnham THE SPECTATOR Books of the Year)
