It’s a wildly discursive (perhaps too much for some tastes) though hugely entertaining book, just over 220 generously printed pages: I have read it twice but feel I have just skimmed the surface. Now the scalpel, so to speak, has changed hands and Marsh, who has retired, finds himself on the receiving end after a cancer diagnosis.īut that is only the jumping-off point for this remarkable book: it is admittedly a patchwork covering a rich tapestry of topics from woodworking, trekking in the Himalayas, the etchings of the 16th-century German artist Albrecht Durer, the Covid lockdown, the working habits of Ukrainian snipers, roof scammers who plague elderly homeowners, the bewildering structure of the brain, sleep and the nature of dreams, the joys of pottery, hospital decorations, quantum physics, the actions of an MRI scanner. His earlier book Do No Harm, an enthralling and very frank account of his storied career in neurosurgery around the world, was an international bestseller. He is not short of vanity, as he admits, and after all, you have to be pretty ballsy to be prepared to cut people’s heads open for a living, to quite literally hold someone’s life in your hands. Brain surgeon Henry Marsh is a rock star of medicine, a description which will not I imagine dismay him.
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