Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and Brain Surgery - Henry Marsh Audiobook

Written by Henry Marsh
Read by Jim Barclay
Format: MP3
Bitrate: 64 Kbps
Unabridged

Publisher: HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books
Release date: May 26, 2015
Duration: 09:33:28

What is it like to be a brain surgeon?

How does it feel to hold someone’s 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 life-saving operation when it all goes wrong?

In neurosurgery, more than in any other branch of medicine, the doctor’s oath to ‘do no harm’ holds a bitter irony. Operations on the brain carry grave risks. Every day, Henry Marsh must make agonising decisions, often in the face of great urgency and uncertainty.

If you believe that brain surgery is a precise and exquisite craft, practised by calm and detached surgeons, this gripping, brutally honest account will make you think again. With astonishing compassion and candour, one of the country’s leading neurosurgeons reveals the fierce joy of operating, the profoundly moving triumphs, the harrowing disasters, the haunting regrets and the moments of black humour that characterise a brain surgeon’s life.

In this memoir of a long career, English neurosurgeon Marsh reveals both a “weary and knowing skepticism” and a striking determination to help the desperately ill despite the uncertainties. “The operating is the easy part, you know,” one neurosurgeon’s advice to him; “the difficulties are all to do with the decision-making.” Marsh’s remarkable, unblinking honesty shines through in each of the starkly different cases he describes, including a little boy with a progressive cancer whose family came to believe he could “go on being treated forever”; the death “without regret” of his own mother from metastasized breast cancer; and the devastating outcome of a difficult operation on an 11-year-old Ukrainian girl with a large but benign brain tumor that was slowly killing her.

Jim Barclay’s authoritative British-accented narration is befitting for the purveyor of delicate and exacting medical procedures. Barclay’s tone does tend toward a sort of exasperation or haughtiness. Whether this is due to his narration style or is an exaggerated portrayal of the author’s frustrations on the page is not evident. Nonetheless, the book is an informative look at the joys and trials of a practicing brain surgeon.

VERDICT This audiobook is highly recommended for those interested in modern medicine and in understanding the life of health-care providers and many of the issues they confront. -