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sondosia's review against another edition
3.0
Very odd book. It’s less a memoir of a brain surgeon and more a memoir of someone who, among other things, is a brain surgeon. I didn’t dislike it, but something about it left me uneasy. Maybe that’s a good thing.
coronaurora's review
3.0
Two and a half years back, I remember being left a little bewildered by the celebrated first book by ace surgeon Marsh which came packaged as a slice of life memoir-of-sorts which, to my consternation back then, alternated unannounced between his frustration with the current management styles in NHS hospitals, some scenes from difficult neurosurgical cases that took you right into the heart of his surgical practice and his brief, thwarted attempt to set up a neurosurgical mentorship and practice in Ukraine. You briefly caught him cycling, but the real person behind that meticulous professional stayed off the page. Marsh was seen introducing his readers to his art, his skills and his tools, and understandably kept the anima behind the persona off the page.
Admissions, his second outing, is the missing companion text to Do No Harm that introduces one to Henry Marsh the person behind the surgeon. I took right on to it after being struck by the introductory confessional where Marsh is seen contemplating about such morbid realities as suicide, euthanasia and what constitutes a good death. In his lonesome geriatric amble as he is considering a newly acquired retirement cottage as his next renovation project, he lets his nimble mind take his readers on various professional and personal trips down the memory lane, all tinged with a surprising dose of regret.
With castigating candour he is seen drawing his personal equations, remembering the father whose memoir he wished he had written, the mother he wished he had spent more time with, the ex-partner he wished he had a better marriage with: Mr Marsh is practically unrecognizable as this doubtful old man.
His sometimes uncomfortably intimate confessions in Admissions made me befriend Mr Marsh, an experience I enjoyed more than Do No Harm’s warranted but cold showboating from a pioneer in neurosurgery. Here, the counterpoints between the personal anxieties and the professional certitudes are stark. When a pioneer is seen dissecting a dedicated but narrow life with so much dejection and cynicism, I found myself privately cheering him on when he switched gears and busied himself in detailing a recollected neurosurgical case, However the binding theme here is that of despairing weariness as the retiring Marsh opens his eyes to the world outside neurosurgery and readies himself for retirement.
He is seen dismantling all his achievements, unpacking all the uncertain moments in his illustrious career and is seen nervously groping for the Truth, wondering if there was a point to some, or any of it. What did all those trials, all that accumulation of knowledge, all those tremendous battles of will and action amount to? Did they have any significance outside the tight context of the healthcare system and institutions he tutored and practiced in? Arguably not, and this is terribly humbling, both for him and us. Seeing him mope about listless and unheard in an overpopulated, under-resourced, money-for-treatment outpatient clinic of a Nepalese hospital is a mind-state you didn’t expect Mr Marsh to find in, and there he is, open to Consider and Meditate.
Being confronted with cultures, societies and problems completely foreign, he is seen re-evaluating the place of neurosurgery in the broader scheme of things; his righteous professional absolutism thawing into a more relativistic space and this makes for a remarkably more mature appraisal by him about his work’s Value (“As the human population continued to grow exponentially, and as I read it I wondered whether becoming a doctor, healing myself by healing others, might not be a little self-indulgent”).
In this heightened philosophical state that he has worked himself in, the aphorisms from his pen acquire a new beauty, sieved as they are from the filters of contradictions and dualities that Mr Marsh is seen newly comfortable with. Especially here: “A good doctor will speak to both the dissonant selves of a dying patient – the part that knows that it is dying, and the part that hopes that it will yet live. A good doctor will neither lie nor deprive the patient of hope, even if the hope is only of life for a few more days. But it is not easy, and it takes time, with many long silences.” or “Many medical decisions – whether to treat, how much to investigate – are not clear-cut. We deal in probabilities, not certainties.”
It is curious to observe that the same nervousness around senescence and dying that afflicts most of us also keeps this man awake: a man who has dexterously handled living tissue and cleaved dying tissue of other people, and has managed to wrestle in a good few months to years of thinking, breathing life for hundreds of patients “As I have got older, I have instead come to realize that we have no idea whatsoever as to how physical matter gives rise to consciousness, thought and feeling. This simple fact has filled me with an increasing sense of wonder, but I have also become troubled by the knowledge that my brain is an ageing organ, just like the organs of the rest of my body.”
Sometimes, the heavy-handed existentialism gets a bit too indulgent and dysphoric or veers towards adolescent solipsism, but as we see him return to the elements: to the sights, smells and sounds of nature, he makes you smile. Its endearing to see him lose himself in the world of trees and tree surgery where he waxes eloquent about the smells of a freshly severed oak bark, and he makes for equally joyful company as he playfully searches for the Big Questions of Humanity by contemplating the brains, minds and inner lives of animals.
By exposing his wounds so fearlessly, his subsequent rage at the litigious culture, and the exasperation at the dehumanizing, manager-driven NHS becomes a lament you want to lend an ear to. The questions he asks while articulating the woeful final moments where he has had to unceremoniously resign or is summoned to courts hits home with the young practicing clinician within me who is getting used to being part of the chaotic, failing-but-standing socialized healthcare.
Admissions, his second outing, is the missing companion text to Do No Harm that introduces one to Henry Marsh the person behind the surgeon. I took right on to it after being struck by the introductory confessional where Marsh is seen contemplating about such morbid realities as suicide, euthanasia and what constitutes a good death. In his lonesome geriatric amble as he is considering a newly acquired retirement cottage as his next renovation project, he lets his nimble mind take his readers on various professional and personal trips down the memory lane, all tinged with a surprising dose of regret.
With castigating candour he is seen drawing his personal equations, remembering the father whose memoir he wished he had written, the mother he wished he had spent more time with, the ex-partner he wished he had a better marriage with: Mr Marsh is practically unrecognizable as this doubtful old man.
His sometimes uncomfortably intimate confessions in Admissions made me befriend Mr Marsh, an experience I enjoyed more than Do No Harm’s warranted but cold showboating from a pioneer in neurosurgery. Here, the counterpoints between the personal anxieties and the professional certitudes are stark. When a pioneer is seen dissecting a dedicated but narrow life with so much dejection and cynicism, I found myself privately cheering him on when he switched gears and busied himself in detailing a recollected neurosurgical case, However the binding theme here is that of despairing weariness as the retiring Marsh opens his eyes to the world outside neurosurgery and readies himself for retirement.
He is seen dismantling all his achievements, unpacking all the uncertain moments in his illustrious career and is seen nervously groping for the Truth, wondering if there was a point to some, or any of it. What did all those trials, all that accumulation of knowledge, all those tremendous battles of will and action amount to? Did they have any significance outside the tight context of the healthcare system and institutions he tutored and practiced in? Arguably not, and this is terribly humbling, both for him and us. Seeing him mope about listless and unheard in an overpopulated, under-resourced, money-for-treatment outpatient clinic of a Nepalese hospital is a mind-state you didn’t expect Mr Marsh to find in, and there he is, open to Consider and Meditate.
Being confronted with cultures, societies and problems completely foreign, he is seen re-evaluating the place of neurosurgery in the broader scheme of things; his righteous professional absolutism thawing into a more relativistic space and this makes for a remarkably more mature appraisal by him about his work’s Value (“As the human population continued to grow exponentially, and as I read it I wondered whether becoming a doctor, healing myself by healing others, might not be a little self-indulgent”).
In this heightened philosophical state that he has worked himself in, the aphorisms from his pen acquire a new beauty, sieved as they are from the filters of contradictions and dualities that Mr Marsh is seen newly comfortable with. Especially here: “A good doctor will speak to both the dissonant selves of a dying patient – the part that knows that it is dying, and the part that hopes that it will yet live. A good doctor will neither lie nor deprive the patient of hope, even if the hope is only of life for a few more days. But it is not easy, and it takes time, with many long silences.” or “Many medical decisions – whether to treat, how much to investigate – are not clear-cut. We deal in probabilities, not certainties.”
It is curious to observe that the same nervousness around senescence and dying that afflicts most of us also keeps this man awake: a man who has dexterously handled living tissue and cleaved dying tissue of other people, and has managed to wrestle in a good few months to years of thinking, breathing life for hundreds of patients “As I have got older, I have instead come to realize that we have no idea whatsoever as to how physical matter gives rise to consciousness, thought and feeling. This simple fact has filled me with an increasing sense of wonder, but I have also become troubled by the knowledge that my brain is an ageing organ, just like the organs of the rest of my body.”
Sometimes, the heavy-handed existentialism gets a bit too indulgent and dysphoric or veers towards adolescent solipsism, but as we see him return to the elements: to the sights, smells and sounds of nature, he makes you smile. Its endearing to see him lose himself in the world of trees and tree surgery where he waxes eloquent about the smells of a freshly severed oak bark, and he makes for equally joyful company as he playfully searches for the Big Questions of Humanity by contemplating the brains, minds and inner lives of animals.
By exposing his wounds so fearlessly, his subsequent rage at the litigious culture, and the exasperation at the dehumanizing, manager-driven NHS becomes a lament you want to lend an ear to. The questions he asks while articulating the woeful final moments where he has had to unceremoniously resign or is summoned to courts hits home with the young practicing clinician within me who is getting used to being part of the chaotic, failing-but-standing socialized healthcare.
kk_brock's review against another edition
challenging
emotional
informative
reflective
slow-paced
3.75
thedoctorreads's review against another edition
4.0
‘Admissions’ begins with a startling admission—Henry Marsh shares the contents of his ‘suicide’ kit. This is the first of many, many such searing confessions from a surgeon nearing the end of his career. As the pages progress, you realize that his reasons for keeping the aforementioned kit are far from sentimental. Like a bear chewing off its leg when caught in a trap, Marsh would rather still the singing of his neuronal pathways while he still had the chance, rather than let their orchestral hum be distorted by disease or debilitation. Does that make him a bitter idealist? Or a heartbroken romantic?
“I have learnt that handling the brain tells you nothing about life - other than to be dismayed by its fragility.”
The book has a fractured narrative that takes places across decades, spanning continents—a chapter that beings in present day London winds back to his early days as a neurosurgeon in the NHS, another chapter that begins as an account of his day seeing patients at a camp in Nepal circles back to his schoolyears and the teacher who bullied him into learning swimming—much like the circuitous nature of memory itself, the present is never a moment to experienced, merely to be lived through the lens of either the past or the future. It is in this balance that so much of our life is spent that one can argue we never truly live, unless free of the burden of both.
“The only meaning of death is how I live my life now and what I will have to look back upon as I lie dying.”
There is an undercurrent of rage here, a blazing river coursing through the otherwise sedate narrative that circled back to one theme—raging against the dying of the light, rage against advancing old age upon a mind still clinging to its fiery youth. Like watching a battle-hardened wolf against the elements, you root for the wolf even as you rail against the inevitable toll that life extracts from all of us bound to the spokes of its ego crushing wheel.
“I suspect most surgeons understand too well the French surgeon Leriche’s remark that all of surgeons carry within ourselves an inner cemetery where the headstones for all the patients who have come to harm at our hands are to be found.”
This was a difficult memoir to read, more because the confessions here are wrought after a life spent trying to correct the mistakes that created them. It is humbling to know that even at our best and brightest, we are still liable to make mistakes. It is the essential contradiction that lies at the heart of practicing medicine.
“I have learnt that handling the brain tells you nothing about life - other than to be dismayed by its fragility.”
The book has a fractured narrative that takes places across decades, spanning continents—a chapter that beings in present day London winds back to his early days as a neurosurgeon in the NHS, another chapter that begins as an account of his day seeing patients at a camp in Nepal circles back to his schoolyears and the teacher who bullied him into learning swimming—much like the circuitous nature of memory itself, the present is never a moment to experienced, merely to be lived through the lens of either the past or the future. It is in this balance that so much of our life is spent that one can argue we never truly live, unless free of the burden of both.
“The only meaning of death is how I live my life now and what I will have to look back upon as I lie dying.”
There is an undercurrent of rage here, a blazing river coursing through the otherwise sedate narrative that circled back to one theme—raging against the dying of the light, rage against advancing old age upon a mind still clinging to its fiery youth. Like watching a battle-hardened wolf against the elements, you root for the wolf even as you rail against the inevitable toll that life extracts from all of us bound to the spokes of its ego crushing wheel.
“I suspect most surgeons understand too well the French surgeon Leriche’s remark that all of surgeons carry within ourselves an inner cemetery where the headstones for all the patients who have come to harm at our hands are to be found.”
This was a difficult memoir to read, more because the confessions here are wrought after a life spent trying to correct the mistakes that created them. It is humbling to know that even at our best and brightest, we are still liable to make mistakes. It is the essential contradiction that lies at the heart of practicing medicine.
luda1985's review against another edition
3.0
I enjoyed the reflective aspect of this book. As a future healthcare professional It was interesting to hear his regrets regarding his career, such as the way he communicated with a dying patient. I also enjoyed reading of his work in the Ukraine. The book as a whole was enjoyable but I wouldn’t read it again.
anfendy's review against another edition
4.0
Tad bit disappointing but learned a lot. Love his recollections of Nepal and Kathmandu.
ginnygriggs's review against another edition
3.0
"But neither the sun nor death can be looked at steadily..."
I've been fascinated by neuroscience since I was in high school, so I couldn't pass this by. It ended up as more memoir and less medicine than I anticipated, which was somewhat disappointing (but in itself, the book wasn't bad). Marsh thoughtfully weaves together professional recollection, social commentary, and personal history as he contemplates his retirement from neurosurgery, the realities of bodily suffering, and the end of life.
I've been fascinated by neuroscience since I was in high school, so I couldn't pass this by. It ended up as more memoir and less medicine than I anticipated, which was somewhat disappointing (but in itself, the book wasn't bad). Marsh thoughtfully weaves together professional recollection, social commentary, and personal history as he contemplates his retirement from neurosurgery, the realities of bodily suffering, and the end of life.