Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery [Paperback]

Named a Notable Book of the Year byThe New York Times Book ReviewandThe Washington Post

What is it like to be a brain surgeon? How does it feel to hold someones life in your hands, to cut into the stuff that creates thought, feeling and reason? How do you live with the consequences of performing a potentially lifesaving operation when it all goes wrong?

With astonishing compassion and candor, leading neurosurgeon Henry Marsh reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets and the moments of black humor that characterize a brain surgeons life.Do No Harmprovides unforgettable insight into the countless human dramas that take place in a busy modern hospital. Above all, it is a lesson in the need for hope when faced with lifes most difficult decisions.

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

His love for brain surgery and his patients shines through, but the specialty--shrouded in secrecy and mystique when he entered it--has now firmly had the rug pulled out from under it. We should thank Henry Marsh for that. The Times

When a book opens like this: I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing'  you can't let it go, you have to read on, don't you? Brain surgery, that's the most remote thing for me, I don't know anything about it, and as it is with everything I'm ignorant of, I trust completely the skills of those who practice it, and tend to forget the human element, which is failures, misunderstandings, mistakes, luck and bad luck, but also the non-professional, everyday life thl_