Author(s): Henry Marsh

BIOGRAPHY

What is it really like to be a brain surgeon, to hold someone's life in your hands, to drill down into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially life-saving operation when it all goes wrong? In this powerful, gripping and brutally honest account, one of the country's top neurosurgeons reveals what it is to play god in the face of the life-and-death situations he encounters daily. Henry Marsh gives a rare insight into the intense drama of the operating theatre, the chaos and confusion of a modern hospital, the exquisite complexity of the human brain, and the blunt instrument that is surgeon's knife by comparison. In neurosurgery, the doctor's oath to 'do no harm' holds a bitter irony, as all operations on the brain carry grave risks. This book is about the agonising human dilemmas behind every operation - for the patient, their families and for the surgeon. It is also a deeply personal account - an education in Marsh's own fallibility, the limitations of medicine, the corrupting influence of power, and, above all, the universal need for hope when faced with life's most difficult decisions.